Ranking Led Zeppelin's Studio Albums

-

The first time I really listened to Led Zeppelin was in my junior year of high school, when my friend John gave me a copy of Led Zeppelin IV for Christmas. It was one of those rare, consistent albums that I could listen to from start to finish without wanting to skip a track. Not too long after that I picked up Houses of the Holy and was surprised to find that I liked that album even more. Sometime after that, I picked up Led Zeppelin II, which I didn't like as much as the other two albums I already had.

After high school, I picked up the boxed set. This was my first exposure to a lot of the tracks from the albums I didn't own. One of the things about the boxed set that I heard people say they didn't like was that the tracks were out of chronological order, and it can be kind of confusing as to which song came from which album. A few years later I picked up the second boxed set which included all of the remaining studio tracks not on the first boxed set (pretty cool of the band to do this).

Starting in 2014, they began releasing the albums again, remastered (again?), and optionally available in deluxe editions with extra content. I'd never been fond of the boxed set audio (and even that was remastered), feeling that it sounded a little flat. But I wasn't sure I wanted to buy these songs again. However, with the digital versions being produced to meet the Apple Digital Master qualification, I gave them a listen, liked the sound, and, over time, bought each of the albums. This is the first time I've owned most of these in their non-boxed set versions, and was surprised by some of the minor differences in the songs between the original albums and the boxed sets. This is also the first time I'm hearing most of these songs in the original album order.

So, after finally being able to listen to the songs as they were originally released, I'm able to rank, in my opinion (yours will vary), the albums.


Coda

9. Coda

Coda is a much better name than Leftovers, which is what this album essentially is. Produced to fulfill a contractual obligation, it's a compilation album with a few live tracks in addition to the studio tracks.

Even though this is widely considered their worst album, it's not a bad album. It's just the least among them. For the deluxe edition, this one got, not one, but two bonus discs, which I think is pretty cool. For some reason, Hey, Hey What Can I Do? and Travelling Riverside Blues were included with the bonus tracks on the deluxe edition, even though Hey, Hey What Can I Do? would've been a better fit as a bonus track on Led Zeppelin III, as it was the B-side to Immigrant Song from that album.

Favorite Tracks: Walter’s Walk and Ozone Baby

Led Zeppelin

8. Led Zeppelin

I know it's a classic, but this is one of my least favorite Zeppelin albums. I just feel that they got better over time, and this was the genesis. Again, I don't dislike it, but I think what came after was better.

Favorite Tracks: Good Times Bad Times, Dazed and Confused, and Your Time Is Gonna Come


Presence

7. Presence

This one's considered one of their weaker albums, but still has some great stuff. I feel like, for the most part, each album was a little better than the previous, though this one seems to break that pattern a bit, in my opinion.

Favorite Tracks: Achilles Last Stand, For Your Life, Royal Orleans, and Hots On for Nowhere


Led Zeppelin II

6. Led Zeppelin II

They're still firmly blues-rock at this point, but getting a little more diverse. It improves on the first album while setting a trajectory for things to come. Ramble On may be my second-most favorite Led Zeppelin track.

Favorite Tracks: What Is and What Should Never Be, Thank You, and Ramble On

And at this point, things got a little difficult

I had a difficult time ranking the albums at this point. During the course of writing this, Led Zeppelin III jumped up one or two spots (and could potentially jump one more). While I can honestly say there's stuff on each of the aforementioned albums that I like, the albums that follow are, in my opinion, stronger overall, and thus harder for me to rank.


Led Zeppelin IV

5. Led Zeppelin IV

A classic album, one of those I can listen to without wanting to skip a track. Four Sticks might be my least favorite here, and even that I don't dislike.

Favorite Tracks: Rock and Roll, Stairway to Heaven, and When the Levee Breaks


Led Zeppelin III

4. Led Zeppelin III

It's a tough call for me between this one and Houses of the Holy. I could easily swap these two in my ranking. Really a tough call. Both are great albums. The band takes a different direction on this album from their first two, going with a more acoustic, folk sound at times, despite the hard-edged opener, Immigrant Song. Also, the sentiment of Friends is appreciated.

Favorite Tracks: Immigrant Song, Friends, Out On the Tiles, Tangerine, That’s the Way, and Bron-Y-Aur Stomp


Houses of the Holy

3. Houses of the Holy

As already mentioned, it was really a tough call between this and Led Zeppelin III for the Number 3 spot. There's something about the mix, and the overall vibe, of this album, that I really love. The album closer, The Ocean, is among my Top 5 Led Zeppelin tracks.

Favorite Tracks: The Song Remains the Same, The Rain Song, and The Ocean


In Through the Out Door

2. In Through the Out Door

Their last true studio album, this one is strong overall, with some of my favorite Zeppelin tunes. Hot Dog is out of left field and totally not the sort of thing I'd normally listen to, yet it works for me. They'd come a long way by this point and their sound had evolved quite a bit, but not in a bad way.

Favorite Tracks: In the Evening, Fool In the Rain, Hot Dog, Carouselambra, and All My Love

Physical Graffiti

1. Physical Graffiti

The fact that this is a double album gives it an advantage -- there's more to like. Kashmir is probably my all-time favorite Led Zeppelin track (and Robert Plant's too). A lot to like here.

Favorite Tracks: The Rover, Houses of the Holy, Trampled Under Foot, Kashmir, In the Light, Ten Years Gone, and The Wanton Song


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Resolving the "n timer(s) still in the queue" Error In Angular Unit Tests

-
A few months ago one of the developers I work with ran into the below error in an Angular unit test: 1 timer(s) still in the queue The fix was to specify a particular amount of time in the tick() call as shown below: it( 'should set accountConfirmationDetails when getAccountConfirmationDetails is called' , fakeAsync(() => {          // Arrange          let  spyGetAccountConfirmationDetails = spyOn(accountService,  'getAccountConfirmationDetails' )         .and         .returnValue(Promise.resolve(AccountMockData.mockAccountConfirmationDetails));                    // Act         fixture.detectChanges();         tick(15000);          // Assert         expect(spyGetPaymentConfirmationDetails).toHaveBeenCalled();           expect(comp.zone).toBe(42);           expect(comp.hasValidProfile).toBeTruthy(); })); Hoping this helps someone!
Read more

How to Get Norton Security Suite Firewall to Allow Remote Desktop Connections in Windows

-
Image
I ran into an issue recently with RDP connections being blocked by the firewall in Norton Security Suite. I checked the traffic rules under Settings > Firewall > Traffic Rules  and found that it was enabled by default (and couldn't be edited): But during further research, I found  this page  on Norton's support site which discusses the different trust levels of networks and mentions that, for the Public trust level, "This setting also blocks remote desktop connections by default.". I checked my network's trust level, and sure enough, it was set to Public (I'm not sure how/why). (Sidebar: Notice in the screenshot above that allowing Remote Desktop for Public Networks is defaulted to Allow , though that rule is not active). Here's what my network trust level looks like now after changing the setting to Private (accessible under Settings > Firewall > General Settings > Network Trust ): After changing the network trust level t
Read more

How to Determine if a Column Exists in a DataReader

-
I recently had to work on something which required me to query a database, open the results in a DataReader, and check for the existence of a particular column. While the DataReader doesn't have a method to do this, with just a few steps I was able to accomplish this task. Here's how. First, the DataReader has a method named GetSchemaTable() , which returns a DataTable consisting of information regarding the data contained in the DataReader. The first column in this DataTable is named ColumnName , and its value is (obviously) the name of the column. Knowing this, we can loop through the rows in the DataTable, checking the ColumnName column for a value that equals the name of the column we're looking for. To this end, I wrote a static method in one of my classes which takes the DataReader and the name of the column being sought: (C#) public static bool HasColumn(DbDataReader Reader, string ColumnName) {    foreach (DataRow row in Reader.GetSchemaTable().Rows)    {       
Read more

Silent Renew and the "login_required" Error When Using oidc-client

-
I recently implemented the Silent Renew functionality of oidc-client in an Angular application I work on, and was getting reports that the users' tokens were still expiring. This made no sense to me as I'd verified the code was working during development, but yesterday I found the problem and am hoping it will save someone some time. The error we were getting back was "Error from signinSilent: login_required". This indicates that the user's session is no longer active on IdentityServer and they must re-authenticate -- which, of course, is what we're trying to prevent by using Silent Renew. In our case, the problem wasn't with the Silent Renew functionality, but rather the user's session was expired. The reason why  it was expired was because, for some reason, we were setting the session length to 15 minutes instead of the default 10 hours . What was occurring was that Silent Renew was attempting to renew a token after 55 minutes (60 minutes expirat
Read more

Fixing the "Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation" Error In An Angular App After Upgrading to webpack 4

-
I'm currently in the process of upgrading an Angular application which does not  use the Angular CLI from webpack 2 to webpack 4. The incremental upgrade from webpack 2 to 3 was easy, but once I made the jump from 3 to 4, I encountered a lot of problems. I went through them one by one, but the one that had me stumped was the following: Unhandled Promise rejection: Unexpected value 'MakePositivePipe' declared by the module 'SharedModule'. Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation. ; Zone: <root> ; Task: null ; Value: Error: Unexpected value 'MakePositivePipe' declared by the module 'SharedModule'. Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation. The code was transpiling/compiling fine, but this error was occurring when I'd navigate to a page containing this pipe. This code has worked fine under webpack 2 and 3. I made sure that the pipe was being set up as a declaration , which it was. What finally  corrected the issue for me w
Read more