Led Zeppelin Reviews on this page: Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin II Led Zeppelin III Untitled ... Walking Into Clarksdale These guys sound great until you hear all the old records they stole their riffs from . Seriously, though, producer/songwriter/guitarist/everything-worth-mentioning Jimmy Page is no genius, but in his Zep days he was a master craftsman: he wrote lots and lots of classic riffs, and his solos drew on an encyclopedic knowledge of rock guitar. The better Zep albums are carefully realized, effective rock and roll. Despite all his borrowings, Page has become tremendously influential in his own right, particularly his reliance on crunching licks and power chords. Plant has also had a huge influence on metal vocalists; I'm not a big fan, I find his lyrics pretentious and his voice whiny, but there's no denying he's distinctive. Bonham and Jones formed a solid rhythm section, often adding something interesting to the mix. (DBW) Sure, Jimmy Page was no Jimi Hendrix , but he still had a certain genius for generating commercial product. And his guitar playing was versatile and extraordinarily technically proficient. His rapid-fire pentatonic licks are worth copping by guitarists like myself who will never have the musical intelligence to understand Hendrix's convoluted soloing, and the band was to its multitude of unimaginative imitators as Hendrix was to them. Despite this, I rate all of Zep's records within very narrow limits (two and a half to four stars). The simple reason is that the band had an extraordinarily consistent sound - that's not a compliment. Those who care about such things will note that Jimmy Page has recently remastered the entire Zeppelin catalogue; the original releases on CD have a reputation for second-rate sound (sound OK to me, though). | |
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