144. Led Zeppelin, "Physical Graffiti"

 


Let's get this out of the way right off the top: yes, this is the album that "Kashmir" is on.  (And yes, in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," Mike Damone tells Mark Ratner to play side one of Led Zeppelin IV to woo a girl and instead he's playing "Kashmir," a continuity error noted by generations of potheads.)  

Remember the 70's?  Probably not.  It was the Age of the Double Album, when the view was "if you can record twice as much music, you can make twice as much money."  And that's what this album is, a single album's worth of good songs and another single album of filler.  It's rock at its most bloated and self-indulgent, and I don't even necessarily mean that in a bad way.  

So the good stuff is very good.  There's "Kashmir," of course, an absolutely iconic rock song, with the driving rising guitar and the strings and the whole feel of weighty importance.  My favorite song on here is "Houses of the Holy," which was recorded for the album of that name but didn't make the cut.  It's got that incredible guitar tone and those weird chords and it's the only Zep song with cowbell!  How can that be true?  It's true.  "Black Country Woman" was literally filler, an outtake from Houses of the Holy that was added here to fill out the runtime, but it's a sweet acoustic stomp that stands on its own merits.  I love the weird sounds in "Trampled Under Foot," an extended woman-as-car metaphor:

Automobile with comfort
Really built with style
Specialist tradition
Mama, let me feast my eyes
Talking 'bout love
Talking 'bout love
Talking 'bout

Factory air-conditioned
Heat begins to rise
Guaranteed to run for hours
Mama, you're the perfect size
Talking 'bout love

Haha.  Dumb as fuck, but wouldn't be topped until "Little Red Corvette" 10 years later.  "Bron-Yr-Aur" sounds like what if a gnome played guitar like Nick Drake 

Even the filler isn't that bad, just too long.  Go ahead and shoot me but "In My Time of Dying," that 11-minute warhorse, is way, way too long.  "Ten Years Gone" would be a great 4-minute song, but it's 6-plus.  And come on with "Down By the Seaside," that song is boring as fuck.

Anyway, yeah, it's a classic, and of course, being a white suburban teenager of course I had a copy of this album.  In fact, I remember playing it for my sister trying to get her into it when she was like 8 or whatever.  I guess it worked?

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Oh, fine, ok.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip hop"
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  Do you want the good news or the meh news first?  The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me.  I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be.  The meh news?  I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently.  Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey.  (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th
Read more