Led Zeppelin III

About

After releasing two gargantuan albums and trekking across the country on a nonstop touring schedule, Led Zeppelin needed an escape from 1969. To refresh the band members’ energy and conjure new musical spirit, the group relocated to a rustic 18th-century Welsh cottage named Bron-Yr-Aur in January 1970. The only song the band finished there was “That’s the Way,” which introduced a richly produced delicateness to Zeppelin’s palette, building from <i>Led Zeppelin II</i>’s muted “Thank You.” Jimmy Page’s acoustic tendencies had been mostly latent, save his refiguring of Scottish fingerpicker Bert Jansch’s “Blackwaterside” as “Black Mountain Side” on the band’s debut album. But when <i>Led Zeppelin III</i> was released in 1970, the album featured a three-track run of acoustic tunes: “Tangerine,” “That’s The Way,” and “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp,” a buoyant front-porch jam about Robert Plant’s dog. Anyone hearing the band for the first time could be forgiven for assuming they were listening to the latest Laurel Canyon folk-rock striver. Strummy acoustic shift notwithstanding, this was still Led Zeppelin. By now the band’s reputation as marauding metal buccaneers was preceding it, and <i>Led Zeppelin III</i>’s darker parts demonstrate how the band members’ rustic reboot invested their hardest music with an earthy historicism. For a lesser group, opening your album by strapping on a horned helmet to dramatize the Viking raids on the British Isles would melt into cartoonish Dark Ages role-play. But this is Zeppelin at peak power, and between Page’s thunderous riffage and Plant’s Nordic wail, “Immigrant Song” is a heavy-metal war cry that hits with the force of an axe to the skull. .

via Apple Music

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