There's a lot of static in the ether, as you may have detected, about the likelihood of a Led Zeppelin reunion sometime this autumn. That'd be nice, of course. But as I was listening to the new Robert Plant album for the first time this morning, it struck me: why would he bother going back there, when he's making records as good as this right now? At the moment we're playing a very handy bit of krautrock by Arp, but as I write I'm going to put the Plant album on again. . . OK, here we go. Here's "Rich Woman": heavy freight train rhythm section, a glassy, twanging guitar line that I think is the work of Marc Ribot, and Plant and Alison Krauss locked together in a very discreet, empathetic harmony. Occasional drum explosions. An atmosphere of amiable menace. I like it a lot. Some details, I guess. This is "Raising Sand", and it's not exactly a Plant solo album. Instead, Krauss gets equal billing on these 13 cover versions, produced by the estimable T Bone Burnett. One of the many engaging things about Plant these past few years is the vivid public enthusiasm he clearly has for music - much more so than most of his peers (not least Jimmy Page). But while his last three, hit-and-miss solo albums have been heavy on the desert blues and West Coast psych, "Raising Sand" is a very stylish excursion into American roots music; a place where the distinctions between folk, blues, country and such become blurred. Plant mainly keeps his vocals on a leash (I think it's "Fortune Teller" where he kicks off, but I'll check when I get there). Krauss, meanwhile, is a terrific foil, and it's nice to hear her voice mingle so gracefully with Plant's, in a blend that's a world away from some of her own pillowy, multi-tracked hygienisations of bluegrass. We’re on to their version of Gene Clark’s “Polly Come Home” now, which seemed to be the outstanding track on first listen, and which our Reviews Ed sagely pointed out as sounding uncannily like Low. Burnett has placed acres of empty space in the mix, leaving the spare guitar, bass and solemn drum strikes reverberating beneath Plant and a notably ethereal Krauss. I have my headphones on, and I can pick up a lot of hovering violin (played by Krauss herself, maybe?) buried deep in the mix, which adds to the generally spooked atmosphere. The only Plant song on “Raising Sand” is “Please Read The Letter”, salvaged from the Page/Plant album, “Walking Into Clarksdale”. Admittedly I haven’t played that one since it came out, so I’m guessing that this version is not much like the original. Even in these subtle environs, though, you can spot the continuity between Plant’s work, that kind of righteous, faintly indignant stomp which underpins so many of his tunes. As Krauss steps up with her fiddle again, Plant lets out a few disconsolate “Ows!”, and there’s a delicious sense of tension, of the great man struggling desperately not to go off into a traditional, hair-tossing number. Curiously, the hard-fought discretion is more exhilarating than, I think, if he’d succumbed to the full ejaculatory operatics. Krauss’ solo take on “Trampled Rose” is superb, too, at once precise and murky, a sort of theatrical southern gothic. This music is too considered, too staged, to be entirely satisfying for the sort of dunce who gets hung up about bogus notions of “authenticity”, I suspect – though parsing authenticity in music is a fool’s game, at the best of times. But that doesn’t mean the way Plant and Krauss inhabit these finely-selected songs is any less compelling. What shines through – and I guess you could draw comparisons with the Johnny Cash/Rick Rubin sessions as an unlikely parallel – is an instinctual love of music and an understanding of how a good song works best. It’s not as good as a Led Zeppelin album, of course. But I can’t help thinking it’s a damn sight better than what would happen if Plant tried to make a Led Zep album in 2007. This is where his heart is now: what is and what should be, you could say, if you were desperate for an ending.

Our correspondent at the Venice Film Festival saw Todd Haynes' Dylan film I'm Not There this morning. Here's our exclusive report. “I accept chaos. I’m not sure that chaos accepts me.” With these words, the shaggy haired Arthur (Ben Whishaw), the film’s de facto narrator and self-styled renegade symbolist poet articulates one the more pertinent truths that arise in I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’ extraordinary biopic of Bob Dylan. Fans of Haynes’ surreal, impressionist glam-rock opera Velvet Goldmine will not what to expect, while those that hated it will know exactly what to fear. Starring six different actors playing the singer through six distinct phases in his chameleonic career, I’m Not There is an academic exercise that strives for far more than biopic and quite shockingly succeeds. Tellingly subtitled The Lives And Time of Bob Dylan (note the latter singular), Haynes’ film is yet another formally playful dissection of pop culture, wilfully arty but unexpectedly powerful in its use of image and music. Scattered with snippets of Arthur musing to camera, the film is not, as expected, a series of vignettes, with one Dylan morphing, Dr Who-like, into the next. Instead, there are five parallel timelines, starting with a young black boy named Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin) who acts as metaphor for the early troubadour Dylan, hopping trains with thoughts of Guthrie in his mind. The film then skips to Jack Hawkins (Christian Bale), an angry folk singer whose songs and energy become a focal point for a generation. These scenes give way to a more classic Dylan figure, Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), an angry and intellectual figure, at war with the press and, more explicitly, with his fans, who he assaults, literally, with machine guns at his electric debut. These incarnations seem obvious enough, but there are two more that give the film a more personal skew. Robbie (Heath Ledger), an actor-biker figure, and Billy (Richard Gere), a suede-jacketed outlaw that lives in a surreal, ongoing Western world, where the figure of Pat Garrett looms large. Least successful, perhaps, is Pastor Joe (Bale again), a folkie turned preacher who abandons commercial music to perform for a local church. Haynes claims never to have met or spoken to Dylan, and the film’s key strength is its fandom, using an interesting array of cuts, and tapping the iconic "Like A Rolling Stone" only in the end credits, when it segues into Antony & The Johnsons’ mournful "Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door". Certain songs do get centrepiece status, however, such as a blistering "Ballad Of A Thin Man", performed by Blanchett, and The Band’s beautiful "Goin’ To Acapulco", sung by a white-faced, Rolling Thunder-style Ledger. But the film has a lot for fairweather Dylan fans to get up to speed with fast, offering tidbits of biography with little explanation, illustrating his foray into fiction, for example, with the image of a giant tarantula (see what he did there?). But for the most part, Dylan is his own screenwriter, and this is where I’m Not There really his its spot, recontextualising Dylan as a pop-culture phenomenon, surfing folk cult status, pop fame and bourgeios patronage, and projecting his successive alternate identities next to one another where we can see the differences and continuities. It may not be to all tastes, and it’s Benny Hill style nod to Beatlemania will be the litmus test that decides its friends and foes, but this is terrific, provocative rock cinema, creating an experience that has to be seen and heard to be felt while also paying an appropriately cryptic homage to a self-made myth and legend. DAMON WISE

I knew I was heading for trouble at last night’s Hold Steady show at Camden’s Electric Ballroom when I realised that I was so excited by what I was listening to that I was knocking back a pint per song – which meant by rough reckoning that I was soon going to be either behaving outrageously or completely unconscious, unless one of us slowed down. Since the songs at this point are coming thick and fast, one crashing in as the one before it crashes out, and The Hold Steady are gaining greater velocity by what seems the minute, it’s unlikely anything short of the stage catching fire and collapsing beneath them will put anything like a halt to the kind of momentum they’re quickly building up. So I guess if I don’t want to end up soon face down on the floor, people stepping over me, on their way to the bar, I’d better cool it for moment, which is a tough call in the circumstances, because when they’re going at full blast like they are tonight, there’s something about The Hold Steady that encourages all kinds of letting go, in much the same way, it strikes me, as seeing The Faces years ago would always be like being at the wildest sort of party, rowdiness and a fucking great time absolutely guaranteed. The Hold Steady have become such a fixture of the Uncut landscape since we made Boys And Girls In America our album of the month that people might think we have shares in them, which we don’t. We’re just fans, as inspired as everyone else who’s here by what they do, which is play smart, brilliant, loud, exciting rock’n’roll. Tonight they seem to play just about everything from Boys And Girls In America, and by the general consensus of fans I speak to on the way out may never have played some of these songs so well – everything they do seems just about perfect, their performance honed to a point of breathtaking excellence by month after month on the road, gig after gig in club after club, and over the summer festival after festival. Highlights then are many, and everything fuelled by a reckless euphoria – “Hot Soft Light”, “Party Pit”, “Stuck Between Stations”, “Southtown Girls”, a fantastic “Chillout Tent”, a sensational blast of “Positive Jam”, the opening track from their first album, and of course “Killer Parties”. Brilliant, brilliant stuff