I don’t know why, but part of me has always had this sense that the quality of Led Zeppelin dropped off once they started giving their albums names. It’s not exactly true, this is still a strong album, even if it does recycle some material from earlier albums in order to pad out the run time to a double album.
The Zep have clearly absorbed some contemporary changes in music – there's a very Southern Rock feel to both The Rover and In My Time Of Dying, especially with the bluesy distorted slide guitar motifs. Meanwhile, the funky beat to Trampled Underfoot bears a passing similarity to Stevie Wonder’s Superstition. So while the undeniable Led Zeppelin sound is there, they’ve moved with the times as well, which is a good thing for a creative endeavour to survive.
The album opener, Custard Pie, however, feels almost like a parody of a Led Zeppelin song, harkening back to, say Good Times/Bad Times from the debut album in terms of sound. Side Two ends with the epic bit of swirling Orientalism that is Kashmir – what stood out for me on this listen was John Bonham’s drumming. Given that for the most part the track is a steady plod, he really invests it with interesting fills to break up the journey, when he could have simply kept up a simple beat.
The musical variety continues on Side Three – In The Light is a bit psychedelia, a bit prog, Bron-Yr-Aur is an acoustic offcut from Led Zeppelin III and Down By The Seaside is a little bit of country rock that it didn’t surprise me a bit to learn had been inspired by Neil Young; it certainly wouldn’t appear out of place in a CSNY family album. In keeping with the running theme that all double albums have one weak side, for me the album faded out a bit on Side Four, which consists mainly of Stones-esque rock/country rock standards that are fine, but don’t hold a candle to the epics elsewhere on the album.
Although there are some tracks on here that I easily remembered (e.g. Kashmir), many I didn’t recall from the names but their opening few notes brought all the memories flooding back. What I remembered the most about this album was the sleeve design – the windows of the brownstone buildings are cut-outs, and the inner sleeves could be replaced to either fill in the name of the album, or to show photos of various historical figures inside (I think that there was something printed on the inside of the sleeve as well, so even with nothing inserted there was something in the windows. This is the kind of detail that you can only really get with the vinyl version, another aspect of the “album” experience lost on CD, let alone streaming.
I still don’t think it has the impact of Led Zeppelin I – the songs are more technically assured but lack that spark of random energy that a band has before they’ve become tired of the recording and touring grind.
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