![]() There’s a version of “When The Levee Breaks” which actually sounds different from the released version. Better still, it rounds up early-’70s strays like “Hey Hey What Can I Do?” (from an Atlantic sampler album) and “St Tristan’s Sword” (a III-era item). With more open ears, “Wearing And Tearing”, “Darlene” and “Ozone Baby” sound as if future Zep albums could have seen the band deliver something re-engaged with blues and old rock’n’roll – a kind of heavier Exile On Main St, perhaps. If there is pure genius in this last set of remasters, it is in how Jimmy Page has contrived to turn Coda from a desultory selection of offcuts into an essential purchase. The heavier contemporary numbers (particularly the furious “Wearing And Tearing”, in which Plant barks like a Jack Russell) hint at a fire still burning, but ultimately only appeared on Coda. The opener “In The Evening” sets a magnificent riff in the haunting pan-global ambience that permeated some of Physical Graffiti, while elsewhere John Paul Jones and Robert Plant, the group’s early risers, completed the album with tuneful pop. Page came to regard In Through The Out Door as transitional, which isn’t surprising since the band’s future movements would presumably have featured work on which he roused himself from his Sussex pit to play electric guitar. “As you’ve no doubt read the reviews…” he grinned, “…it’s tremendous. After some remarks about caves in Peru, he announced the band’s forthcoming new album. Nor did he sound completely confident about his place in this new world. “ No Quarter” went a bit reggae, Page poured sweat, and Plant danced like Kate Bush. As such, it throws forward to In Through The Out Door, an LP on which John Paul Jones enters the spotlight.Īt the band’s huge Knebworth show, a couple of weeks before the album’s release, Led Zeppelin were tentatively emerging from a lengthy hiatus, acknowledging that all was not the same in the world as when they last performed in it. “10 Ribs & All/Carrot Pod Pod (Pod)” is, whatever that title may mean, everything the LP is not: a tender piano piece. The discs of “companion audio”, often short on revelation, here reveal a moment of sheer anomaly. When they were vulnerable, Zeppelin threw up their guard – here even the plaintive blues “ Nobody’s Fault But Mine” assumes a mighty and rebarbative nature rather at odds with the lyric. Page has called the record (made with little pre-production and mixed quickly in studio time begged from the Stones) “urgent” and “anxious” –one way of saying it’s all rock, but not much roll. In lyric form and musical scale, it was epic – the marauding Viking charge of “ Immigrant Song” raised exponentially to the power of Game Of Thrones. No acoustic guitars, no additional colours, no outside influences on the riffing, a song like “ Achilles Last Stand” was the antithesis of the hungry-eared and multi-textured “Kashmir”. After a bad car accident, Robert Plant sang Presence on crutches, while Page’s vision for the LP was metallic. The fact that In Through The Out Door contained an epic synth song and an Elvis pastiche compounds the feeling that the subsequent death of John Bonham didn’t so much bring Led Zeppelin down in flames as stop them abruptly between new, weird stations.įor all their talk of battle, the devil and Mexico, these are not warm records. ![]() In the last installments of the band’s reissue programme you can hear remastered shifts in personal dynamics (Plant and Jones ascendant Page in retreat) reflected in music that was martial, haunted and oddly un-Zeppelin-like. ![]() Instead, their final studio albums, conceived while fighting grave personal problems, found them grimly digging in and fighting on. Rather contrary to their initial expectations, Led Zeppelin never did crash and burn. ![]()
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