***** Houses of the Holy by Led Zeppelin – The Best Led Zeppelin Album

Everybody, or perhaps almost everybody has their favorite Zeppelin album.  This one is mine.  And, this isn’t some sort of new thing for me.  This has been my favorite Zeppelin album since even before I got the 10 disc box set of all their albums back in high school.  I remember reading a Zeppelin biography by an insider in the Led Zeppelin outfit and this is the album I played all the while I was so fascinated when I read it.  In my opinion, this album is the last good one before Robert Plant needed help to make his voice sound thicker by electronics.  Since I learned Plant was a smoker, it became very easy for me to identify that his career’s glory would be shortened because physically one can’t expect to be a good singer if he or she is a smoker.  It just can’t be done.

My favorite song on this one is, “The Song Remains the Same.”  I appreciate it for its complexity, especially when I was a kid and was not familiar with more music.  If you have been a reader of mine, despite how unpopular cerebral music tends to be these days, I can tell you this is a good one.  Certainly, not the most of all time or something like that, but it sounds like a lot of work was put into it.  The Song Remains The Same is a work I would hope that anybody would be able to enjoy.

John Bonham is most certainly one of the best drummers ever in my opinion.  Too many drummers today trigger their material, such that every time a drum is hit, it sounds exactly the same way.  If you ask me, that’s cheating.  He might very well be my favorite drummer of all time because sometimes Dennis Chambers plays too many notes, and sometime Virgil Donati lacks taste in favor of playing something that can be done.

However, if you just listened to The Song Remains the Same, it would be a shame.  This record is awesome from start to finish.  Even its weakest song The Crunge is worth listening to.