Printer Friendly

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/20947111/led_zeppelin_the_essential_albumbyalbum_guide

Rollingstone.com

Back to Led Zeppelin: The Essential Album-By-Album Guide

Led Zeppelin: The Essential Album-By-Album Guide

From the First Album to "Mothership": An Expert Rundown of Every Studio Album, Live Disc and Reissue

DOUGLAS WOLK

Posted Jun 12, 2008 3:30 PM

LED ZEPPELIN (1969)
Key Tracks: "Dazed and Confused," "Communication Breakdown"
Quick Take: Road-tested before it was recorded on a Scandinavian tour (as "the New Yardbirds"), the repertoire on Zep's debut album was largely drawn from vintage blues and folk records. The sound of it, though, was something massive and new, driven by Jimmy Page's mindbending, string-bending studio ingenuity.

LED ZEPPELIN II (1969)
Key Tracks: "Whole Lotta Love," "Heartbreaker"
Quick Take: Released a mere nine months after their debut and recorded hit-and-run-style on the road, their follow-up is practically a riff encyclopedia, and the template for hard rock even now. There's still a lot of Chicago blues in here (Willie Dixon and Howlin' Wolf ended up with songwriting credits after lawsuits), but Page's guitar freakout on "Whole Lotta Love" sounds more like Martian blues.

LED ZEPPELIN III (1970)
Key Tracks: "Immigrant Song," "Gallows Pole"
Quick Take: It's odd to think of a record that includes a couple of the toughest rockers ever as Zep's "acoustic album," but Page's unplugged wizardry and John Paul Jones' mandolin are all over it. More to the point, its roots are in folk music — its galloping centerpiece "Gallows Pole" was adapted (via Leadbelly) from the traditional song "The Maid Freed From the Gallows."

LED ZEPPELIN IV (1971)
Key Tracks: "Stairway to Heaven," "When the Levee Breaks"
Quick Take: Zep's best-selling album — platinum twenty-three times over — and a masterpiece of passion, craft and range: rock & roll as orgasm, folk music as saga, mysticism as glamour, blues as the apocalypse itself, rhythms any other band would kill for as filler. If "Stairway" is a cliché, it's only because it's amazing enough that it's been played threadbare.

HOUSES OF THE HOLY (1973)
Key Tracks: "Dancing Days," "D'yer Mak'er"
Quick Take: The sound of a band at the top of the world, gazing down on it. Their radiant cockiness was at its peak, and so was their rhythmic dexterity; besides the cosmic-minded rockers and quiet-but-heavy ballads, there are winningly earthy, affectionate parodies of James Brown and reggae. P.S. The reggae song's title is pronounced "Jamaica."

PHYSICAL GRAFFITI (1975)
Key Tracks: "Kashmir," "Trampled Underfoot"
Quick Take: This double album was padded with outtakes from earlier records, but hugeness, even overinflation, was part of the point — both the majestic scale of the songs themselves and the boogie-to-bombast stylistic sweep of their densely layered recordings. This is blues-rock with enough leverage to move mountains. Lyrical topics: sex, mortality, travel, groupies.

PRESENCE (1976)
Landmark Tracks: "Achillies Last Stand," "Nobody's Fault But Mine"
Quick Takes: Recorded in a hurry, and a serious mess — Plant was in a wheelchair following a car accident and understandably sounds winded, and Page's well of riffs was running dry. They're trying for the epic grandeur of their recent peak, but aside from a few passages of dark, murky pathos, they just end up sprawling and sagging instead.

IN THROUGH THE OUT DOOR (1979)
Key Tracks: "All My Love," "Fool in the Rain"
Quick Take: The late Seventies had been rough on the former golden gods, so they reinvented themselves into something more contemporary for their final album. John Paul Jones' keyboards nudge Page off to the side, John Bonham grooves more than he hammers, and Plant brushes away his blues mysticism to plead like a weathered roué.

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME (1976)
Key Tracks: "Moby Dick," "Dazed and Confused" Quick Take: A stopgap product while Robert Plant recuperated, the soundtrack to the concert film of the same name, recorded at Madison Square Garden concerts in 1973, has a dubious rep — everyone knew Zep was a better live band, and the endless soloing on its second disc does get tedious. The recent expanded remaster shows off the band's muscle and plumage more flatteringly, though.

CODA (1982)
Key Tracks: "Poor Tom," "I Can't Quit You Baby"
Quick Take: Led Zeppelin broke up after John Bonham's 1980 death; this collection was an archive-clearing exercise, with outtakes recorded between 1970 and 1978. There's nothing revelatory here — all the great stuff ended up on the real albums — but nothing embarrassing either, especially since the band's studio leftovers were being bootlegged anyway.

LED ZEPPELIN (a.k.a. BOX SET) (1990)
Quick Take: The first Zep box includes about two-thirds of their repertoire, resequenced in not-quite-chronological order by Jimmy Page, with two unreleased tracks and a B-side as completist bait. The attendant publicity helped to make them fashionable again.

BOX SET 2 (1993)
Quick Take: Lest anyone who picked up the first Zep box get bummed at the prospect of shelling out for Complete Studio Recordings too, this two-disc gesture compiled everything from the nine canonical albums that didn't end up there, plus the first-album outtake "Baby Come On Home."

COMPLETE STUDIO RECORDINGS (1993)
Quick Take: Just like it says on the label: the original albums plus Coda and the four bonus tracks from the two box sets, as well as a small hardcover book with photos and a brief essay about the band's history. Listen to their works, ye mighty, and despair.

BBC SESSIONS (1997)
Key Tracks: "You Shook Me," "Going To California" Quick Take: An official release of some of the most-bootlegged Zep material: a bunch of slightly undercooked sessions recorded for British radio by the hungry young band in 1969 (including three takes on "Communication Breakdown" and a couple of otherwise unavailable covers), and a ragged but raucous 1971 gig where they're trying out new tunes like "Black Dog" and "Stairway."

EARLY DAYS: THE BEST OF LED ZEPPELIN VOL. 1 (1999)
Quick Take: A thirteen-song condensation of albums I-IV, it leaves out a lot of the odder and more adventurous excursions that gave the original records their dramatic arcs, not to mention the classic-rock radio staple "Heartbreaker." Still, you can't argue with its sheer firepower.

LATTER DAYS: THE BEST OF LED ZEPPELIN VOL. 2 (2000)
Quick Take: What, no "D'yer Mak'er" or "Fool in the Rain"? Otherwise, a solid single-disc tour of the inconsistent 1973-1979 era, emphasizing the epic and dramatic side of the band over the speedy and joyful side — the average song length is over six minutes.

HOW THE WEST WAS WON (2003)
Quick Take: A Frankenstein's monster of an album: assembled from heavily doctored pieces of two 1972 concerts, and crushingly powerful anyway. The riff-rockers on the first disc hammer like the gods, the improvised medleys on the other two discs are impressively freewheeling and the drum solo is forgiveable.

MOTHERSHIP (2007)
Quick Take: The latest best-of has a track listing virtually identical to Early Days and Latter Days (and the now-out-of-print two-disc Remasters), plus a bonus DVD that condenses their double-DVD retrospective from 2003, and no previously unreleased material. Still, it's a useful introduction if you've somehow avoided radio altogether for the last thirty-nine years.