Led zeppelin presence9/5/2023 ![]() It might be their weakest album, but Presence is among the most special none of these songs sound like they could have come from another record. Indeed, the overall lack of melody on Presence shows you just how underrated Zeppelin were in that department (as does the previously unreleased bonus track "10 Ribs & All/Carrot Pod Pod (Pod)", a blandly pretty piano-led instrumental with a chiming acoustic guitar that's the closest Zep ever got to yacht rock). One thing Presence most certainly is not is Plant's album he sang these songs from a wheelchair, still recovering from a car wreck, and his voice sounds pinched and thin on the group's least inspired tunes. Distortion is used sparingly, as is reverb though the songs contain many layers of guitars, the focus is on overlapping lines and counterpoint, even at the expense of riffs. Page keeps his parts unusually lean, emphasizing percussive force over atmosphere. Listen to how Jones' bass syncs with Bonham's kick drum on the tumbling stop/start masterpiece "Nobody's Fault But Mine", which certainly ranks with either's greatest moments, or the loping "Hots on for Nowhere", where the pauses serve as a third rhythm instrument. Throughout the album, bassist John Paul Jones and John Bonham are so perfectly in tune they seem like a single organism. There are moments of space and silence and very little standing in between the instrument and the listener. But the hard and brittle sound of Presence (at points, it sounds like a Shellac album) has much to admire, not least because you can hear the contributions of each band member so clearly. ![]() (" Presence is just perfection," Jim O'Rourke told Time Out Tokyo, and given his preference for clean and crisp engineering and arrangements, his admiration makes perfect sense.) It's the Zeppelin album that was least embraced by the radio, with its lengthy songs and general aversion to hooks. It has also developed a cult following in a way that no other single Zeppelin album has. Page's strong hand led to an album that puts the focus on the playing and makes the fewest concessions to pop music. The recording is ultra dry and the simple guitar/amp interface is front-and-center just one song features an acoustic instrument, and the album has barely any keyboards. The former was very much driven by Jimmy Page, who wanted badly to keep the band busy during a time of retrenchment following the serious car accident that injured Robert Plant in August 1975. Presence and In Through the Out Door are opposites. But both are redeemed by the fact that they are also easily their two strangest. The two LPs, newly reissued (along with 1982's posthumous odds-and-ends comp Coda) to round out what will almost certainly be the last large-scale catalog effort in the lifetime of the band members, were easily their weakest. In the five-and-a-half years between the February 1975 release of Physical Graffiti and the death of drummer John Bonham that ended the band in September 1980, they released just two albums- Presence in March '76 and In Through the Out Door in August '79. They were getting older and growing tired they did too many drugs they were too isolated. But given their penchant for excess and the hyper-intense life they lived as the world's biggest rock band in the '70s, there was no way it could last. During that time, everything seemed to go their way: they had a bottomless well of songs built on the blues, early rock, British and American folk, psychedelia, and R&B they had the greatest riff machine the world had ever known in Jimmy Page, and they had hard rock's quintessential drummer in John Bonham. ![]() In the first six years of Led Zeppelin's existence, they released seven albums' worth of music, and nearly all of it was brilliant.
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