So I never really got with the Plant/Krauss album. I liked it and all but it never grabbed me, you know, right there. Then I read the current issue of the very fabulous Believer magazine - http://www.believermag.com/ - and saw Greil Marcus discuss it as follows:

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - the old rocker and the bluegrass queen: Very nice people. Very polite. To each other and the songs, and to you. But all the singing is whispering and it was the dullest album of the year.

Onstage, though, fevor comes out - especially for Led Zeppelin songs that go back through the woods. On YouTube videos from this year's New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the Druids in "Battle of Evermore" take to the skies: two final minutes of furious mandolin slashing and Plant's snaggletoothed hair bucking ("Bring it back! Bring it back!" My God, are you sure? Bring that dragon back?) as if the notes have him on a trip wire. For "When the Levee Breaks" with Plant quieting Krauss's keening fiddle to let lines from Bob Dylan's "Girl from the North Country" float through to be lost in the flood, the song sweeps up Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, who recorded it in 1929, and walks their ghosts across the stage.

I bring this up because: a) He's entirely right about how astonishing the live renditions are. Watching it now the hairs on my arms are standing up all over again. b) It made me realise how much I think the Believer mag hits the same spots as The Word, and thus I felt I should recommend it here.