Led Zeppelin

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Physical Graffiti (Remastered)
    Physical Graffiti (Remastered)
    Physical Graffiti (Remastered)

    Led Zeppelin were on a tear in the early part of their career, releasing a streak of riff-driven albums between 1969 and 1973 that set a new standard in hard rock. While each of those first five records was created during a concentrated period of recording, much of the sixth, the double LP Physical Graffiti, drew from material developed at earlier sessions. Tracks like the crunching “Houses of the Holy” (intended as the title track for their 1973 album) and the loose and lyrical “Down By the Seaside” (written in 1970 and reworked for the group’s fourth record, but ultimately not included) may have been meant for other projects, but they easily meet the band's exacting standards. And the odds-and-ends feel of Physical Graffiti is one of its strengths, showing every side of Led Zeppelin in a single sprawling package. The extended format means the band can indulge every whim and include experiments that might have been harder to justify on a single disc. The proggy, bluesy “In My Time of Dying”, slinking along on the back of some of Jimmy Page’s greasiest slide-guitar work, stretches past 11 minutes, shifting from a deathly crawl to a raucous double-time romp. Meanwhile, the gorgeous acoustic instrumental “Bron-Yr-Aur” showcases the group’s interest in mystical folk, and “Boogie With Stu” is a ragged and joyous jam on an old Ritchie Valens tune. Physical Graffiti has its share of rock radio classics, too—see the haunting “Kashmir”, which mixes a punishing groove with Middle Eastern modes and features one of Robert Plant’s most unhinged vocals, and the supremely funky “Trampled Under Foot” (John Paul Jones credits Stevie Wonder as the inspiration for its clavinet-delivered stomp). In these brilliant and widely loved songs as much as in the lesser-known gems that surround them, Physical Graffiti proves that as the second half of the '70s dawned, Zep were still making more killer music than they knew what to do with.

  • Led Zeppelin IV (Remastered)
    Led Zeppelin IV (Remastered)
    Led Zeppelin IV (Remastered)

    Years after Led Zeppelin IV became one of the most famous albums in the history of rock music, Robert Plant was driving toward the Oregon Coast when the radio caught his ear. The music was fantastic: old, spectral doo-wop—nothing he’d ever heard before. When the DJ came back on, he started plugging the station’s seasonal fundraiser. Support local radio, he said—we promise we’ll never play “Stairway to Heaven”. Plant pulled over and called in with a sizable donation. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the song, he said later. He’d just heard it plenty before.  It hangs together well enough as an album. But the real beauty of IV is as a collection of seeds, each sprouting in a different direction: gentle folk (“Going to California”) and nasty blues (“Black Dog”), the epic (“Stairway to Heaven”) and the concise (“Rock and Roll”). That fans have fought for years over the album’s perfect moment (it’s “When the Levee Breaks”) is a testament not only to the passion the band inspires, but also to how perfectly they capture their own internal yins and yangs. An entire ecosystem of music could be built on the songs here. And it was. Overstated? Yes—there are times when IV seems to exist to ask why you would overdub one guitar when you could overdub four. But if the flowery stuff doesn’t work for you (“The Battle of Evermore”), the dirty stuff (“Misty Mountain Hop”) probably will, and if you prefer your symphonies to stay in the concert hall, the band still sweats, pounds and moans enough to scandalise company at levels polite and otherwise. The irony of IV is that it opened a new world for hard rock by embracing the colour and variety of its natural enemy: pop.

  • Led Zeppelin III (Remastered)
    Led Zeppelin III (Remastered)
    Led Zeppelin III (Remastered)

    After releasing two gargantuan albums and trekking across the country on a nonstop touring schedule, Led Zeppelin needed an escape from 1969. To refresh the band members’ energy and conjure new musical spirits, the group relocated to a rustic 18th-century Welsh cottage named Bron-Yr-Aur in January 1970. The only song the band finished there was “That’s the Way”, which introduced a richly produced delicateness to Zeppelin’s palette, building from Led Zeppelin II’s muted “Thank You”. Jimmy Page’s acoustic tendencies had been mostly latent, save his refiguring of Scottish finger-picker Bert Jansch’s “Blackwaterside” as “Black Mountain Side” on the band’s debut album. But when Led Zeppelin III was released in 1970, the album featured a three-track run of acoustic tunes: “Tangerine”, “That’s The Way” and “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp”, a buoyant front-porch jam about Robert Plant’s dog. Anyone hearing the band for the first time could be forgiven for assuming they were listening to the latest Laurel Canyon folk-rock strivers. Strummy acoustic shift notwithstanding, this was still Led Zeppelin. By now the band’s reputation as marauding metal buccaneers was preceding them, and Led Zeppelin III’s darker parts demonstrate how the band members’ rustic reboot invested their hardest music with an earthy historicism. For a lesser group, opening your album by strapping on a horned helmet to dramatise the Viking raids on the British Isles would melt into cartoonish Dark Ages role-play. But this is Zeppelin at peak power, and between Page’s thunderous riffage and Plant’s Nordic wail, “Immigrant Song” is a heavy-metal war cry that hits with the force of an axe to the skull. While nothing else rocks nearly as hard on Led Zeppelin III, a tangible dread floats through the album, most notably on “Gallows Pole”, a frenzied folk-metal plea from a condemned man that the band culled from a Smithsonian Folkways compilation. Then there’s “Since I’ve Been Loving You”, the band’s finest original blues tune, and the sweltering “Friends”, which wafts out of the speaker on the thick, pungent aroma of John Paul Jones’ Moog drone. Led Zeppelin’s first two albums were made quickly; Led Zeppelin III is the first time the band let their music simmer, and the music’s tone and scope expanded as well.

  • Led Zeppelin II (Remastered)
    Led Zeppelin II (Remastered)
    Led Zeppelin II (Remastered)

    100 Best Albums Critics may not have cared much for Led Zeppelin’s first album—they were wrong—but the band’s fans, especially in the US, more than made up for it. Led Zeppelin II, written and recorded while the group barnstormed America, was released in late 1969, just nine months after Led Zeppelin. Borrowing from the Beatles’ assertion that the album, not the single, was rock’s proper format, the band members resisted releasing the five-and-a-half minute blues-metal maelstrom “Whole Lotta Love” as a single from their second album. Though Atlantic eventually issued a bowdlerised “Whole Lotta Love” as a 45—with the groupie-themed rave-up “Living Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman)” as the B-side—the album version immediately ranked as rock’s most unhinged and elaborate deconstruction of American blues. Cribbing a guitar line originated by Chicago blues legend Willie Dixon—whom Led Zeppelin, as usual, didn’t credit—Jimmy Page inflated the elemental riff into a roaring jet engine, letting Robert Plant off his leash to growl like a satyr during the song’s terrifying psychedelic break. At times, “Whole Lotta Love” sounds like the world is collapsing—and, in a way, it was: Along with The Rolling Stones’ disastrous 1969 Altamont concert and Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut album in February 1970, the chart-topping Led Zeppelin II signaled that merciless, debauched hard rock—the kind performed in arenas and huge fields instead of clubs—was ascendant, and that Zeppelin were the dark overlords of the new regime. While Led Zeppelin was largely the execution of Page’s bleak studio vision, Led Zeppelin II was a more democratic effort, solidified by a line-up that had clearly gelled playing nonstop gigs. On the soulful, Plant-penned power-ballad “Thank You”, the singer even revealed himself to be…grateful? To a woman? Were the members of Led Zeppelin evolving in real time? Meanwhile, Plant and Page collaborated on the buoyant “Ramble On”, with Plant’s lyrics merging the British tradition of free-walking through the countryside with JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, as Page overdubbed acoustic guitars to create a muscular folk-rock. All the while, the quiet John Paul Jones was establishing himself as Led Zeppelin’s secret ingredient, and one of the most inventive rock bassists. Jones contributed light colour to “Ramble On” that channelled Paul McCartney at his melodic finest, and took over “The Lemon Song”, with Page stepping aside to allow Jones to more or less provide the core riff. Rock critics and UK audiences alike were still oddly dubious of Led Zeppelin’s sudden and very loud ascendance, but not only were they here to stay, they were getting better and weirder as they went.

  • Led Zeppelin (Remastered)
    Led Zeppelin (Remastered)
    Led Zeppelin (Remastered)

    When The Yardbirds broke up in 1968, guitarist Jimmy Page and manager Peter Grant quickly hired three musicians to play the band’s remaining concert dates. Page brought on John Paul Jones, who’d earned a sterling reputation as a session bassist and arranger, and filled out his new band with two ringers: A lithe hippie howler named Robert Plant, and his friend John Bonham—a drummer who was wild as Keith Moon, but who maintained the timing of a jazz veteran. Though the four musicians were essentially soloists, there was instant chemistry, and the quartet soon changed its name from the New Yardbirds to Led Zeppelin, and began recording the group’s eponymous debut album in a couple weeks. After Grant secured the band a legendarily lucrative contract with American label Atlantic—one that guaranteed creative freedom—the feverish and futuristic Led Zeppelin was released in early 1969. The album hit the Top 10 in the US, and set a standard for rock-bombast that future bands would either aspire toward...or despise. The word “fusion” isn’t often used to describe hard rock, but Led Zeppelin’s integration of Chicago blues, British folk and San Francisco psychedelia—without credit to the originators—was unprecedented. Plant’s wails against low-down, no-good women are rooted in the blues, but Page—the band’s sonic Svengali—understood the musical past not as traditions to be preserved, but as cool sounds and tunings and themes to reimagine. Combined with his gifts for mic placement and mixing, he dramatically expanded hard rock’s studio vocabulary. It starts during the first seconds of opening track “Good Times Bad Times”, as Bonham and Page swing and pound like roughneck ballet dancers. It was the funkiest British blues-rock interpretation on record, in part because Page gave Bonham and Jones’ polyrhythms so much room to breathe. And it only sprawls out from there: The lacerating “Communication Breakdown” is perfect Who-style garage rock, while Page dragging a violin bow across his E-string on “Dazed and Confused” more or less invented the sludgy B-movie dread of Black Sabbath. The album’s stunning centrepiece, “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”, strips Joan Baez’s live recording of Anne Bredon’s original down to the studs, then rebuilds it as a dynamic rock opera; just when it seems like the storm is over, Bonham’s drum-fills trigger another titanic swell from murmuring acoustic unease to all-out electrified panic. “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” is the promise and peril of Led Zeppelin, in concentrate: All traditions remixed, all women scorned.

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About Led Zeppelin

It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say Led Zeppelin invented heavy metal. Formed by latter-day Yardbirds guitarist Jimmy Page in 1968 (originally as The New Yardbirds), the quartet were among a wave of bands taking the blues-based British Invasion sound in a louder direction. However, no other group wielded their might with such an authoritative sense of groove and grandeur. In Page’s hands, blues-based riffs became as wildly complex as his solos, while the rhythm section featured a drummer (John Bonham) whose kick-pedal could leave craters and a secret-weapon bassist (John Paul Jones) who served as the industrial-strength glue that held it all together. If heaviness was Zeppelin’s only attribute, their place in rock history would still be assured. But their thundering sound was always balanced by a disarming delicacy—best exemplified by the quiet-to-loud ascension of their perennial classic-rock-radio countdown winner, “Stairway to Heaven”. Sure, the group’s golden-god frontman, Robert Plant, possessed a shriek that could summon a fleet of rampaging Vikings (see: 1970’s “Immigrant Song”). But his obsession with psychedelic-folk acts like The Incredible String Band yielded a deep well of tender acoustic serenades, and he swiftly outgrew the girl-done-me-wrong narratives of the blues to weave Tolkien-esque tales that presaged metal’s fascination with medieval mythology. Plus, Page was not only a redoubtable riff machine, but a visionary producer who reimagined the rock album as a widescreen war epic. You can hear that cinematic sensibility take root in the brain-scrambling breakdown of “Whole Lotta Love” (as avant-garde as blues-rock boogie could get in 1969) and achieve its apex on 1975’s “Kashmir”, an epic Eastern-inspired odyssey where Jones’ sinister, Mellotron-manipulated string arrangement proved heavier than any guitar-powered rocker in their repertoire. Zeppelin seemed to be entering a fascinating new phase with 1979’s synth-injected In Through the Out Door, before Bonham’s untimely death a year later brought the band to a sudden end. But through the hair-band wailers of ‘80s, the militant rap-metal of Rage Against the Machine, the battered blues of The White Stripes and the 21st-century swagger of Greta Van Fleet, the aftershocks of Led Zeppelin’s seismic ’70s canon reverberate forevermore.

ORIGIN
London, England
FORMED
1968
GENRE
Rock

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