Word: songful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...remaining members of Led Zeppelin should be mentioned. John Paul Jones is a fluent bassist unseduced by the primordial roar or steadfastness of his instrument. but attracted rather to its opportunities for polyphony. Drummer John Bonham's distinguished use of syncopation unifies, maintains, and elucidates each song. Finally, vocalist Robert Plant provides a fourth instrument which counterpoints and impels the gathering thrust of each song. Plant has a theatrical, coruscating voice capable of a range of tones and speech rhythms equalled only by Paul McCartney. Plant is mainly responsible for raising Led Zeppelin above such groups as Cream, Procol Harum...
...three finest songs on Led Zeppelin's first album illustrate the foremost capacities of the group. "Good Times Bad Times" is based, as is usual with their songs, on an energetic riff rather crudely syncopated but irresistibly developed. Page plays a brief solo characterized by his enormous intervals and rapid triplets: Bonham employs complex drum pedals; Jones adds a sinuous independent bass line: and Plant insinuates a tone of bemused disconsolation into the song's eternal situation of calumniating fate. "Dazed and Confused" deals with incoherent man in the face of a latter-day Cressida. After a sufficiently stunned introduction...
...TURNING to Led Zeppelin II we might feel that the bold change in cover art from the phallic to the cenotaphic argues a change for the worse. Dirigibilis mutabilis! The new album contains two of their best songs, two of their clearest failures, a delight in light parody, and an explicit and jocular exhibitionism, verging at times toward crudity, only suggested in the earlier record. This last element is most apparent in the lurid copulative jactitation of "Whole Lotta Love." This very involved song, with its assemblage of background sounds of connubial exertion, reminds one (very hazily) of Southev...
...forth directly into "What Is and Should Never Be," a desultory serenade. This song's marcato conclusion features the best example of Plant's consummate syncopated singing in which he takes cognizance of each word past and forthcoming, and deftly employs the syllables to counterpoise the principal rhythm. "The Lemon Song" is a tongue-in-cheek medley of blues cliches, even to the point of "down on this killin floor." Although the band is almost as wry as the Beatles in "Yer Blues" or "Helter Skelter," the result here as there does not prove durable. Led Zeppelin's only ostensible...
...Heartbreaker" and "Ramble On" perhaps represent Led Zeppelin's finest achievement. "Heartbreaker" reveals the group at its best, integrating creative solos and complex subordinate lines without verbosity, repetition, or loss of outline. "Heartbreaker" takes its place with "How Many More Times" as a genial yet cynical song about the sumptuous and toxic banquet of credulous infatuation. "Ramble On" is the structural successor to "Babe I'm Going to Leave You," in which several sections are unified by Plant's masterful use of slight dynamic and tempo adjustments. "Ramble On," perhaps Led Zeppelin Il's finest song, also affords a good...