Amazon.co.uk Review
Also known as the "rune" album because of the medieval symbols adorning its cover, Led Zeppelin's fourth album, released in 1971, turned them from mere superstars into giant behemoths of the rock world. On tracks like "Black Dog", "Misty Mountain Hop", and "Rock and Roll", the combination of Robert Plant's banshee wails and Jimmy Page's frenetic guitar playing forever altered the stylistic bent of hard rock music. And the foreboding "When the Levee Breaks" demonstrated that Zeppelin could indeed play the blues fairly straight if they so desired. Still, everything here ultimately took a back seat to the album's (and, ultimately, the band's) magnum opus--the expertly constructed and deftly executed classic, "Stairway to Heaven".
--Billy Altman
CD Description
Led Zeppelin's epochal fourth album finds both the band's blues-rock thunder and their gentler, more lyrical side fileddown to a razor-sharp point. "Black Dog" and "Rock and Roll" aren't just perennial air-guitar anthems; they're the ultimate distillation of the blues-inflected, hard-rock fury theband had already been perfecting for the past three years. Robert Plant's Little Richard-on-amphetamines wail rides perfectly atop the band's strategically directed crunch for maximum impact. "When the Levee Breaks"is a titanic take on theblues, with John Bonham's thunderous drums echoing through the subsequent decades. The folkier, acoustic tracks providewelcome moments of beauty and respite, and all the elementsof the band's sound come together in "Stairway to Heaven", a suite of shifting dynamics that would become the Eiffel Tower of classic-rock radio forevermore.