Notes

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An excellent Japanese pressing

Recorded at Musicland Studios, Munich, West Germany

Led Zeppelin's seventh album, PRESENCE, is a straight-ahead rocker, that has much more of a "live" feel than some of their previous recordings. Gone are most of the big production flourishes, and in their place the big power trio + vocals sound that made Led Zeppelin such a popular concert band. The opening "Achilles Last Stand" is a driving, up-tempo rocker, while the closing "Tea For One" is a slow, Chicago-style blues, featuring Plant's moaning vocals and Page's alternatingly sweet, and frenetic solos. Elsewhere, "Royal Orleans" mixes delta blues with Indian music, "Hots On For Nowhere" is a stop-time boogie, and "Candy Store Rock" is heavy metal rockabilly.

Presence scales back the size of Physical Graffiti to a single album, but it retains the grandiose scope of that double record. If anything, Presence has more majestic epics than its predecessor, opening with the surging, ten-minute "Achilles Last Stand" and closing with the meandering, nearly ten-minute "Tea for One." In between, Zeppelin add the lumbering blues workout "Nobody's Fault but Mine" and the terse, menacing "For Your Life," which is the best song on the album. These four tracks take up the bulk of the album, leaving three lighthearted throwaways to alleviate the foreboding atmosphere — and pretensions — of the epics. If all of the throwaways were as focused and funny as those on Physical Graffiti or Houses of the Holy, Zeppelin would have had another classic on their hands. However, the Crescent City love letter of "Royal Orleans" sags in the middle, and the ersatz rockabilly of "Candy Store Rock" doesn't muster up the loose, funky swagger of "Hots on for Nowhere," which it should in order to work. The three throwaways are also scattered haphazardly throughout the album, making it seem more ponderous than it actually is, and the result is the weakest album Zeppelin had yet recorded.