As a child, Robbie Robertson spent summers on a reservation with his mother, who is of Mohawk descent, and on Contact From the Underworld of Red Boy, he is setting out to recover a part of his own past. He's also advancing the cultural project that he began with his 1994 soundtrack album, Music for "The Native Americans." Robertson is determined to elevate American Indian music to an essential place in our nation's heritage. But because Contact is a personal journey, he has the freedom to incorporate all the varied music that has been important to him – from the enduring roots rock he created with the Band to the atmospheric narratives of his solo albums to the up-to-the-minute programming wizardry of mixers Howie B and Marius de Vries, with whom he worked on Contact. The result is a haunting, richly textured blend of ancient spirituality, rattle-the-walls guitar and hypnotic beats.

For example, "The Sound Is Fading," the album's opening track, samples a young American Indian singer from a 1942 Library of Congress recording, constructs a keyboard melody based on her vocal and bathes both of those elements in synthesizer swirls and storms of Robertson's guitar. "Peyote Healing" colors the mesmerizing chants of a peyote ceremony with subtle keyboard, guitar and percussion touches.

"Sacrifice," the album's showpiece, features a chilling telephone conversation with American Indian activist Leonard Peltier, who describes the shootout at the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota, in which two FBI men and one American Indian were killed. Despite his proclamations of innocence, Peltier has been imprisoned since 1976 for the murders of the agents. Nonetheless, his faith in his cause is unshaken – and inspiring: "There's a lot of nights that I lie in my cell and can't understand why this hell, this hell and this terror that I've been going through for twenty-one years hasn't ended.... [But] I've gone too far now to start backing down. I don't give up. Not until my people are free will I give up."

In Robertson's hands, all the diverse aspects on Contact From the Underworld of Red Boy cohere into a compelling whole, a national chronicle of glory and shame, a personal story ringing with conviction. (RS 782)

ANTHONY DECURTIS