Categories : Country + Western, Featured Review, Music Reviews.
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Rating: 2.5/5 Released: April 26, 2006 Reviewer: Trent Depue |
Seven years in the making. Given that this is stickered to the front of every copy of All The Roadrunning one would imagine that it’s a good thing. But you must also ask yourself whether taking this much time to make an album only illustrates a lack of interest and commitment.
All the Roadrunning contains all the elements of a fantastic album. Emmylou Harris is brilliant, but unfortunately for Mark Knopfler too much so – she outshines him in a performance that otherwise could have competed with his best. Musical quality is also excellent and is, not surprisingly, spearheaded by Knopfler’s trademark lead guitar work. But when it all comes together, something just doesn’t work.
The artists do come out strong on the first few tracks. ‘I Dug up a Diamond,’ is nothing short of beautiful and following that is ‘This is Us,’ the first (and really only) track on the album that screams out Mark Knopfler/Dire Straits. It is around this point that Harris stops providing quiet harmonization for Knopfler and really turns it on vocally, turning Knopfler into something of a moot point for the rest of the album, despite his writing almost every song on it.
With two artists as revered and influential as Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, one would expect great things and although the album has moments of brilliance in comes out flat in a lot of places. In the end, the best thing they could have done with it would have been to trim off the fat and release it as an EP.
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