As headline guests at David Lynch’s inaugural Festival Of Disruption in LA in October 2016, Robert Plant and his globalised roots-rock collective played a muscular set that’s captured in this no-frills concert video in agreeably crisp, crunchy sound.
The Space Shifters make scant concessions to the Lynchian setting, aside from dressing all in black. But the band are on blazing form, couching Plant’s ragged roar in sinewy Afrobeat, finger-picked avant-bluegrass, torrid flamenco guitar and burbling bluestronica.
Highlights include Whole Lotta Love stripped down into a kind of shamanic choral chant, and the widescreen, U2-ish shimmer-rock of recent composition Rainbow. However, the original set has been edited to an hour, cutting tracks like Dazed And Confused and Bukka White’s Fixin’ To Die, which feels pointlessly stingy.
Lynch himself appears in the bonus features, talking gnomically about music, creativity and meditation.
