Led Zeppelin IV (Remastered)

iTunes Review

With each successive studio album Led Zeppelin further defined their territory and their artistic reach. For album number four, often referred to as “Runes” for the Runic symbols on the cover, Zep pulled all the aspects of their legend into tight focus. “Black Dog” twisted a blues-boogie riff around Robert Plant’s macho swagger and drummer John Bonham’s unerring sense of time, while “Rock and Roll” took a primordial textbook guitar riff and slammed it into the ground. A mandolin and English folk legend Sandy Denny perfectly complement “The Battle of Evermore” and set the stage for the band’s magnum opus, “Stairway to Heaven,” where for eight minutes the band builds its “Bolero,” a simmering to a boil dynamic wedded to a serpentine melody that leads from a mystical English garden to a raving, megalomaniacal climax. “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Four Sticks” exhibit the band’s unusually funky approach to hard rock rhythms. “Going to California” retains a hippie mysticism in its folk roots, while “When the Levee Breaks” shudders with the cataclysmic wallop of John Bonham and guitars that practically bleed from the speakers. Led Zeppelin never cut a bad studio album and most of their work is essential listening to any serious rock music fan. But Led Zeppelin IV remains the group’s crowning achievement.