ALBUM OF THE DAY: LED ZEPPELIN, PHYSICAL GRAFFITI
I forgot to do an Album of the Day feature yesterday, so for today’s Album of the Day I figured I’d do a double album. Few heavy metal bands are ambitious enough to even attempt a double album, and there’s no better band to start with than the one that AllMusic.com’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine calls “the definitive heavy metal band.” Led Zeppelin delivered Physical Graffiti in 1975 a full two years after their last album, an eternity between albums in those days. Physical Graffiti is a masterpiece, with each song occupying a specific role in the sprawling landscape that makes up the whole; most of the rockers are on Disc 1, and Disc 2 with its instrumentals, jams, and chilled out psychadelia to this day remains one of my favorite smoking discs of all time.
Even if you don’t know this album well, you certainly know all the songs on Disc 1; you don’t know you do, but you will surely find yourself singing along from the first note of every song. Starting out with “Custard Pie,” “The Rover,” “In My Time of Dying,” and “Houses of the Holy,”… seriously, are all these amazing songs really in sequence on the same disc?? And of course the ever-ubiquitous “Kashmir” which needs no description. Disc 2 starts out with the razor-sharp keyboards of atmospheric anthem “In the Light,” courtesy of John Paul Jones, which sets the tone for this mellowed out stoner-rock disc. “Down by the Seaside” and the beautiful “Ten Years Gone” are my personal favorites.
Really, you can’t call yourself a true metalhead if you don’t own this album. John Bonham, with the possible exception of Black Sabbath’s Bill Ward, has had the single greatest influence on modern heavy metal drumming. Even the production holds up 32 years later.
-VN
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