Album of the day (#2779): Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin

[albummaster]

Today's album of the day

Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin (View album | Buy this album)

Year: 1971.
Country:
Overall rank: 9
Average rating: 90/100 (from 3078 votes).

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Tracks:
1. Black Dog
2. Rock And Roll
3. The Battle Of Evermore
4. Stairway To Heaven
5. Misty Mountain Hop
6. Four Sticks
7. Going To California
8. When The Levee Breaks

About album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety. A full history of album of the day can be viewed here.

[CharlieBarley]

Amazing album. I love how it has rocking tracks but also mellow tracks then there's Stairway to Heaven which has both in the same song. It pretty much defines the term classic album. My current top pick is Going To California. Very cool song. All that said though it's not my fave Led Zep album. That would be Led Zep 3. Its still a corker of an album though.

[LordMark]

I was initially skeptical about listening to this album. I just assumed that it would be "Stairway to Heaven" and a whole lot of non-essential tracks. Thankfully, I was WAY off on that assumption. As a matter of fact, there just so happens to be one song on this album that I love even more than "Stairway to Heaven", and that is the phenomenal closing track, "When the Levee Breaks". The weakest track here is "Four Sticks", but even it's still great. Led Zeppelin released 6 excellent albums between 1969 and 1975, and this is my favourite of them all.

[Antonio-Pedro]

Overplayed as hell, As is Stairway to heaven, but damn it still rocks my socks. Great song on a meh album
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[Fischman]

Stellar. Classic. Essential. All that and more.

That said, while the first two songs have killer rock riffs, they're pretty pedestrian otherwise. But after that, the album gets, and stays highly creative and its originality stands to this day.

[Repo]

One of the greatest hard rock albums of all time. Truly Mythic. It's between this & III for their best. But yeah. Their first SEVEN albums all kick ass. In differnet ways. They never stayed in one place for wrong. One of the defining bands of the 70s.

[RoundTheBend]

Going To California is easily my most favorite Led Zeppelin song. Thank goodness they didn't just RAWK.

Tracks 3-6 bring this album down just a few points from amazing, but still a 89.3.

I find Stairway to be formulaic prog rock and a bit boring to be honest. Hail Satan and all, but yeah... meh.

Also I rank them/rate them like this:

Led Zeppelin II Led Zeppelin 1969 2 95
Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin 1969 6 90
Led Zeppelin IV Led Zeppelin 1971 3 89.3
Houses Of The Holy Led Zeppelin 1973 2 87.5
Led Zeppelin III Led Zeppelin 1970 11 87
Physical Graffiti Led Zeppelin 1975 10 80
Coda Led Zeppelin 1982 12 77
Presence Led Zeppelin 1976 16 70

[PaperVinnie]

This was one of the last Zeppelin albums I got into. The contrarian in me never allowed myself to fully get into this one, knowing that there is an absolute 0% chance that this is Zeppelin's best album, but I now love this album. Like their other greats, this is a totally coherent and accessible masterpiece, about half the tracks here easily land in Zeppelin's top 20-30.

I tried, but I can only talk about this album for so long without mentioning how incredibly overrated it is. I will legitimately never understand what brought the majority of people to the consensus that this is Led Zeppelin's masterpiece. It's totally ridiculous. This album is not their most coherent, their most hard hitting, or their most representative of them. Also it contains their two most consistently overrated tracks: Rock and Roll and Stairway to Heaven. I like both songs, but whenever I hear people cite either song as Zeppelin's best songs, it simply boggles my mind. Rock and Roll is a very simple and straightforward rock song. Never understood what the big deal is there. I like Stairway and have it ranked in their top 20, but it's still overplayed. I'm not trying to take away from this album. Along with the majority of Zeppelin's catalog, this album is among my favorite things to listen to; I think it's a beautiful, creative, graceful masterpiece, but I simply can't put it higher than Zeppelin 1, 2, or Houses of the Holy.

On the other hand, this might be one of Jimmy Page's best albums as a guitarist, and he certainly has some of his finer moments as a producer. Black Dog is a perfect example of 70s guitar rock perfection, Stairway obviously has a beautiful solo, and the slide guitar/general production on Levee is fucking phenomenal. Robert Plant also features some of his best lyrics on this one (Evermore, Stairway, California). Jones and Bonham kill it on every track too, specifically on Four Sticks and Levee respectively.

Sorry for ranting, but I do really love this album. My favorites are Black Dog, Going to California, and When the Levee Breaks, but I love them all


Edit: Another thing I noticed about this album is that it's the only Zeppelin album I gave 4 songs a 100 on, so that's an interesting feat.

[CA Dreamin]

[CA Dreamin]

Battle of Evermore, baby. What a song.
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