Led Zeppelin - Untitled (1971)

Led Zeppelin started out making music that lived up to their name - bombastic, heavy, overbearing rock and roll steeped in the blues - and thus invented heavy metal in the process.  Their style turned off as many listeners as it attracted, and they were heard as just a loud band with occasional moments of brilliance, but not much worth pondering in the ponderous.  Then, in 1971, Led Zeppelin stretched out and recorded the album that made the British quartet one of the most important bands on the planet . . . while producing one of the most monumental albums of the seventies.

The untitled fourth Led Zeppelin album brought the band out of a strict metal context and transcended their music into directions none of their fans - or their detractors - could have imagined.  Guitarist Jimmy Page's solos were more intricate and his chords let loose without losing any of their thunder, while Robert Plant's vocals became more multi-dimensional.  Better still, the rhythm section of bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham became tighter.  But the material became more sophisticated; instead of the usual power chords and blues ballads, the rockers had more zip and less excess, and the lighter numbers veered toward folk.  "Black Dog," the opening cut, opens up  like a storm with a quick guitar chord and Plant's lascivious question - "Hey hey, mama, 'zat the way you move?" - and then explodes with a Page riff that carries most of the song, while "Misty Mountain Hop" adds a sense of tension with a tightly wound rhythm backed by Bonham's assaults; "Four Sticks" just smolders, like a good rocker should.  "Rock and Roll" - derived from a jam of Little Richard's "Keep A-Knockin'" - is just plain fun, with Page freewheeling on his guitar while guest musician Ian Stewart backs things up with a piano line worthy of Mr. Penniman himself. 

Led Zeppelin's forays into English folk traditions and contemporary American folk-pop, however, are haunting.  The mythical musings of "The Battle of Evermore," with Fairport Convention's Sandy Denny on guest vocals, brings a sense of foreboding matched only by similar exploits on Fairport Convention's own records.  Meanwhile, Zep's acoustic paean to Joni Mitchell, "Going To California," is surprisingly tender - and displays just how influential Mitchell was and is on even the hardest rockers.  Every aspect of folk, blues, and rock Led Zeppelin brings to the fore on this album is encapsulated in "Stairway To Heaven," the ethereal epic track that brilliantly displays the complexity, the power, and, yes, the subtlety of Led Zeppelin's music as it slowly builds from an introspective musing into a searing rock performance - the proverbial iron fist in the velvet glove.  Only Family's "The Weaver's Answer" approaches the same greatness as a heavy rock anthem.  

My favorite track on the album known as Led Zeppelin IV (or Zo-So, or the "runes album"), though, is still the last one, their recontextualization of the 1929 Memphis Minnie blues standard "When The Levee Breaks."  It's a powerful performance that brings the pain and the sorrow of American country blues to life as Led Zeppelin had never done before . . . or since.  Plant sings of the impending flood with the world-weary wisdom of the Delta, while Page's guitar notes come down as hard as the rain.  The sound of Bonham's cymbals in the bridge is the sound of that levee collapsing.  "When The Levee Breaks" sums up the observation of this album from critic Greil Marcus - it was rock that was meant to storm heaven and came awfully close.

(My Sunday record reviews will return in March.)