![]() ![]() Their untitled fourth album, commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV (1971), is one of the best-selling albums in history with 37 million copies sold. In 1970, they released Led Zeppelin III which featured " Immigrant Song". Led Zeppelin II (1969) was their first number-one album, and yielded " Whole Lotta Love" and " Ramble On". Their 1969 debut, Led Zeppelin, was a top-ten album in several countries and featured such tracks as " Good Times Bad Times", " Dazed and Confused" and " Communication Breakdown". Initially unpopular with critics, they achieved significant commercial success with eight studio albums over ten years. Originally named the New Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin signed a deal with Atlantic Records that gave them considerable artistic freedom. Led Zeppelin have been credited as significantly impacting the nature of the music industry, particularly in the development of album-oriented rock (AOR) and stadium rock. With a heavy, guitar-driven sound, they are cited as one of the progenitors of hard rock and heavy metal, although their style drew from a variety of influences, including blues and folk music. The group comprised vocalist Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, bassist and keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham. Longtime fans will find little of use here, although anyone who spends a couple hours with Mothership will find themselves duly reminded that Led Zeppelin are quite possibly the finest rock band of all time.Led Zeppelin were an English rock band formed in London in 1968. It serves, mainly, as an introduction for those (presumably out of classic rock radio range) still unfamiliar with the band. Mothership offers no bonus content or previously unreleased material. Twist your volume knob heavenward and embrace Plant's inescapable geekiness, yelping about Gollum and Mordor chug booze and air-drum with John Bonham: Led Zeppelin sound as tremendous in 2007 as they did in 1972. Check Bonham's pitter-pattering in the verses of "Ramble On", or the still-intact fuzz at the top of "Immigrant Song", or the tiny percussive "fwwpts" on "D'yer Mak'er", or the restored outro to "Over the Hills and Far Away". Still, content-critiquing aside, the remastering on Mothership is no small achievement, and it sounds revelatory on even the shittiest stereos. Early Days and Latter Days has a tracklist similar to Mothership (the latter adds "D'yer Mak'er", "Over the Hills and Far Away", "Heartbreaker", and "Ramble On", but loses "Ten Years Gone", "What Is and What Should Never Be", and "The Battle of Evermore") so, clearly, the idea of Led Zeppelin's greatest hits is contentious even for the band itself.įans will probably argue over Led Zeppelin's selections- omitting "What Is and What Should Never Be" feels unforgivable- and it seems obvious that Page, Plant, and Jones were striving hard to represent every last phase of their career: Some work from the band's crucial 1969-1975 era is sacrificed for late-career tokens like the comparably-mediocre "In The Evening" (itself a curious selection, given the relative popularity of In Through the Out Door's "Fool in the Rain", which was the band's last release to make the pop single charts). And in 2002, Atlantic released Early Days and Latter Days: Volumes 1 and 2 (each previously available as a single purchase, in 19, respectively), a Page-condoned collection of 23 tracks which awesomely featured all four members of Led Zeppelin on the cover, dressed in giant American space suits and perched casually in front of an illustrated moonscape. Mothership is not the first time Page has participated in the distillation of his own work: In 1990, a decade after John Bonham downed his last shot of vodka, Page curated an eponymous boxset (known, in fan parlance, as Crop Circles) which saw their eight-album discography distilled to four perfect CDs. Mothership- a collection of 24 of Led Zeppelin's "greatest hits," remastered and selected by the band's three remaining members (Page, as well as Robert Plant and John Paul Jones)- might be conceptually flawed, but it's hard to argue against songs as indisputably great as these.
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