Led Zeppelin

 

For my first ranking on this blog, I thought I'd try my hand at the Zep (who need no introduction). After listening through their discography, accompanied as always by my beloved wife, I have to say it's one of the most solid in all of rock music. They did not make a bad album, nor did they make one that's obviously better than all the others, so I could imagine almost any combination being somebody's ranking.

And obviously, what a great band. Listening through their discography was a totally enjoyable experience.

8. Led Zeppelin II (1969)

A controversial pick for last place--there are plenty of people out there who would put Zep II top of the podium. After all, it has Whole Lotta Love and Heartbreaker, plus three excellent Plant compositions, What Is and What Should Never Be, Thank You, and Ramble On, that indicate the path the band would take in the 70s. However, the rest of the album doesn't really do it for me, and Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman) is the worst thing they ever recorded.

7. In Through the Out Door (1979)

Jimmy Page was struggling with a heroin addiction and John Bonham was debilitated by alcohol, so it was left to Plant and Jones to piece together most of Led Zeppelin's swansong. Jones' keyboards dominate the album, to great effect on compositions such as Carouselambra, In the Evening, and the beautiful and totally atypical All My Love (dedicated to Plant's late son, Karac). It doesn't feel like Led Zeppelin a lot of the time due to the relative lack of Page, but it's an interesting album that somewhat resembles Plant's early solo work.

6. Led Zeppelin IV (1971)

I don't know what it is about Led Zeppelin IV. This album has at least six compositions that are undisputed all-time Zeppelin classics: Black Dog, Rock 'n' Roll, The Battle of Evermore, Stairway to Heaven, Misty Mountain Hop, and When the Levee Breaks. Logically, it should be in my top three. Something about the album doesn't totally satisfy me, though. The whole is somehow less than the sum of the parts.

5. Presence (1976)

Almost the opposite of Led Zeppelin IV. Probably only two stone-cold classics in Achilles' Last Stand and Nobody's Fault but Mine, and the rest of the album is solid B-grade Zep. However, there's just something about the vibe of this album that I dig, a kind of heaviness and sense of foreboding that hangs over the whole thing. The closing track, Tea for One, is a blatant rewrite of Since I've Been Loving You, but the mood they create is totally different, one of lingering loss and regret.

4. Led Zeppelin (1969)

Led Zeppelin's debut album is one of the most exuberant, innovative, and exciting hard rock albums of all time. It's the band's most purely enjoyable album, filled with crushing blues-rock riffs from beginning to end. The band's infectious enthusiasm combined with Page's brilliant production make this an entirely satisfying listen, and one of the band's four 5-star classic albums.

3. Led Zeppelin III (1970)

Known as Led Zeppelin's "acoustic" album, this isn't exactly that--although an acoustic songwriting session between Page and Plant in a Welsh cottage was a key moment in its creation. It is, however, a much more sonically varied effort than the first two, and one that represents their great artistic leap forward. From the swaggering Immigrant Song, to the intense slow blues of Since I've Been Loving You, to the surprising--and totally convincing--folk-rock of the album's b-side, this eclectic offering demonstrated conclusively that Zep were far from a one-trick pony.

2. Houses of the Holy (1973)

At this point in their career, Zeppelin's songwriting was on such a high level that this album didn't have room for its own title track. Maligned in some quarters for experimenting with reggae and funk on D'Yer Mak'Er and The Crunge respectively (both great fun), Houses of the Holy is a tour de force that's every bit the equal of its predecessor on a song-for-song basis, with tracks like The Song Remains the Same, The Rain Song, No Quarter, and, well, basically all of them, demonstrating that this was a band operating on another level to its peers.

1. Physical Graffiti (1975)

The one with everything. The realization that their new 8-song set was a bit too long to be squeezed onto a single LP prompted Zep to dig up the outtakes from their previous three albums, and the resulting album was an 83-minute tour de force that brought together everything they had been doing over the last half-decade. From the new songs, epics such as Kashmir, In My Time of Dying, and In the Light were crowning achievements, and the quality of excavated songs such as The Rover, Houses of the Holy, and Down by the Seaside belies their status as outtakes. A definitive album that captures everything great about Led Zeppelin and is never dull, despite its hefty runtime.

As always, my wonderful companion in this listening journey was my wife, and she had her own version of the ranking that you might find more to your taste. Here it is:

1. Houses of the Holy

2. Led Zeppelin 

3. Physical Graffiti

4. Presence

5. Led Zeppelin III 

6. Led Zeppelin IV

7. In Through the Out Door

8. Led Zeppelin II