Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin II
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Artist: Led ZeppelinBrand: LED ZEPPELIN
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 1994-06-21
Music Label: Atlantic
Product features:
- Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin Ii Brazil Import
- Whole Lotta Love
- What Is And What Should Never Be
- The Lemon Song
- Thank You
- Heartbreaker
- Living Loving Maid (She's Just A Woman)
- Ramble On
- Moby Dick
- Bring It On Home
Music reviews of Led Zeppelin II
Music Review: Blues done wrong, blues done white
Rating: 1 Stars
I've heard it said before. If there was a rock and roll equivalent of Mount Rushmore then surely four lads from the United Kingdom known collectively as Led Zeppelin would have their faces (for better or worse) gracing the mighty rock. I can even sort of picture it now. Jimmy Page, perhaps chiseled into the rock with a slightly sallow, greenish complexion compliments of some condition picked up from another misspent night with another misplaced hypodermic. Bonzo Bonham, bloated, face like a bowling ball to reflect the many pounds his poor frame endured from chronic alcohol abuse. Robert Plant, head full of dirty blonde, unruly hair, and perhaps the goatee he's taken to sporting in recent days which makes him look like an even lamer version of Sammy Hagar. John Paul Jones, can anyone even remember what John Paul Jones looks like? Neither can I.
It is with not a little awe and certainly a handful of piety that one should gaze upon this collection of washed up ex-junkies, ex-boozers, ex-hippies. Unfortunately the only thing that hasn't been "ex-ed" out yet is the fact that they still insist on trying to make new music. They are for some inexplicable reason, venerated as the Gods of Rock by sundry music lovers. Sadly, unlike most people's more traditional personal gods, whether it be Yahweh, Allah, Christ, or whatever, they refuse to stay out of sight and more importantly, out of sound.
40 years ago, this ragged, unkempt parade of wanna-be's unleashed their second effort in which they successfully exported someone else's ideas to a mass audience. In the case of their particular passion, the blues, they offered absolutely nothing of consequence to a style that had been performed decades before by Black American musicians. I wish to compare and contrast a terrible, shameless band of no depth or orgnality like Led Zeppelin and their treatment of the blues (perhaps better said, their thievery of the blues) with someone who also took as his foundation, blues music, but unlike Zep, he made it his own. I apologize in advance because I'm going to be referring to a very literary and intelligent songwriter and this is anathema to Zeppelin fans. Not to mention it will likely strain their comprehension skills to breaking point.
If we compare Led Zeppelin's embarrassing plundering of the blues style on their first two albums, it should strike any informed fan as the pathetic meanderings of a talentless gang of rip-offs inundating the senses with something that is derived 100% from a sound and style that was decades old at the time. One cannot over-emphasize the word "derivative" enough. It conjures up images of exactly what they are and excel in, hack job replicas, completely second rate, but much more commercial than the original articles they have plundered. The very first track on here was partially nicked from a blues player born in the 1910's called Willie Dixon. As a person who is not fond of the blues played either by the orginal generators of it or their sad rip-off's, I find it uninspiring lyrically and usually dull muscially. The lengthy wailing guitar solo's are simply tedious. However, compare Zep's copycat act with Australian singer/songwriter Nick Cave's first two albums and you will see that they weren't only separated physically by miles and miles, but that Cave is light years beyond them in terms of orginality, intellect, and just simple talent.
Now I'm sure that Zep fans are arduously scratching their heads at the name Nick Cave and aside from the reverberation of the usual empty clinging sound, are at a loss. Cave's first two albums came out in 1984 and 1985. Several years after Zeppelin and he is several years younger as well. It may seem unfair to compare artists that far apart in time, but if it was possible to use the blues as your starting point and still manage to create your own style, it would have been easier to do it in Zep's time. By 1984, the blues was even older, even more plundered by Zep and their sad acolytes. Cave managed to do it then simply because he had something Page and company never will. Brains, talent, skill, ingenuity, creativity, artistry, etc.
Musically Cave and the Bad Seeds entailed four musicians like Led Zeppelin. Unlike Zep however, this quartet who did use blues as their starting point, created something unique and original in spite of the fact. While Jimmy Page abuses his instrument with more frustration and indulgence than a pimply geek on prom night on virtually every song, you'll find not a single guitar solo on either of Cave's first two albums. Not one. Why? Because it's dull, because it's derivative, because it means **** all to anyone who isn't themselves a pretentious white flop trying to ape the blues. "Whole Lotta Love" is ripped off from blues man Wille Dixon, and it's clear. It has about as much uniqueness as any other Zep song on the first two albums, which is to say, none. Lengthy, mind numbingly dull guitar solos and a drummer likely in an alcoholic haze struggling to keep the beat. Cave's "Tupelo" employs minimal instrumentation, it is virtually the bass alone that propels the song along eerily as Cave prophesies the doom that lay ahead for the inhabitants of the birthplace of the King. I'd love to see the hacks in Zeppelin create a song that is driven by little else but the bass guitar, but at this point I'd settle for a Zep song that didn't have a pathetic pseudo-bluesy guitar solo. "Saint Huck" is another that is propelled largely by an eerie bass line and again a demented Cave detailing the doomed Huck's venture from the river to the city. "From her To Eternity" most prominently contains crashing keyboards as well as a rivetting bass. Throughout, the guitar is hardly noticeable, much less aped to the point of fawning adulation as Jimmy Page excels in.
Music aside, perhaps the biggest contradiction is in the lyrics. Whereas Robert Plant appears to have the mind of a petulant child perpetually p*ssing and moaning over matters of the libido (matters one suspects he lacks the maturity to even understand) Cave expands in a unique and original way on elements of blues that were always there. Plant takes elements that were always there in blues lyrics and pretty much regurgitates them verbatim to a white audience (with cutomary orgasmic yelp of course). Cave takes the themes common in blues music, melancholia, despair, hopelessness, bad luck, and then precedes to elevate them to a higher, more literary, adult level. Cave's lyrics explore religion and God and those that they have condemned. They explore dirty death row floors, the psychosis of a broken and jilted lover, the mythology of evil symbols and figures and what it is claimed they foretell. Loneliness, isolation, despair, abandonment by God and/or man, all elevated to a level that is then crammed down the listener's throat with violent assaults of voice and sparse instrumentation. There's not a lot of electric guitar on those first two Cave albums and there's many tracks when the drums are either absent or tame, but this combination contains within it approximately 1000 times more force and power than the "pedal to the medal" pseudo-energy of Led Zeppelin. Perhaps Zep had to be harder and faster in an effort to conceal how truly unoriginal and derivative these guys are. Perhaps it had to be harder and faster to conceal that the Emperor indeed has no clothes on.
Description of Led Zeppelin II
Japanese only SHM pressing. Digitally remastered. The SHM-CD [Super High Material CD] format features enhanced audio quality through the use of a special polycarbonate plastic. Using a process developed by JVC and Universal Music Japan discovered through the joint companies' research into LCD display manufacturing SHM-CDs feature improved transparency on the data side of the disc allowing for more accurate reading of CD data by the CD player laser head. SHM-CD format CDs are fully compatible with standard CD players.Riff rock had been what Jimmy Page's former band, the Yardbirds, were all about, and on Led Zeppelin's second album, released, like its predecessor, in 1969, the inventive guitarist demonstrated that he'd indeed learned his lessons well. Witness "Whole Lotta Love," a woozy epic based on one simple, head-banging-friendly guitar riff. Or the mock-dramatic "Heartbreaker," propelled by far more intricate but similarly effective note squashing. Between Page's sonic wizardry, John Bonham beating his drums into submission ("Moby Dick"), and the juice running down Robert Plant's leg ("The Lemon Song"), Led Zeppelin here just about succeeded in raising rock & roll excess to an art form. --Billy Altman
Led Zeppelin II is an album of Jimmy Page riffs so huge, and John Paul Jones/John Bonham rhythms so deep, that the heavy metal genre this classic helped create has tried for decades to catch up, mostly without success. And no wonder: since II catches the band before they'd headed too far into their ridiculous medieval fancies, this might be as good as Zep would ever be. Regardless, the thunderous "Whole Lotta Love," a Top 5 hit, and "Bring It on Home" are very nearly as fierce and twisted as British white blues would ever get. --David Cantwell
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