Just gave this a listen for the first time in… I don’t know, but it’s an awful lot of years. Was just browsing Youtube and, oh, look, Zep’s YT channel has their first five albums up there in full, why not give the first one another spin, been so long… It’s really not that good, is it? Never been my favourite LZ (I increasingly favour the third album), and it still isn’t… one thing I did kind of rediscover, though, is that their propensity to crap on at unnecessary length was right there at the start of their career (this, of course, was so early that they were still the New Yardbirds when they recorded the album). I mean, look at the lengths of some of those songs (and look at the dominance of slower songs on side one). “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” just about cuts the mustard, “Dazed and Confused” gets by mostly because the instrumental break is still kind of ball-tearing when it speeds up, “How Many More Times” works cos it’s kind of a multi-part jam, but good grief “You Shook Me” is fucking interminable. Obviously they were to even greater lengths in the live arena—I used to have a bootleg where the show was two and a half hours long and fully 90 minutes of that was spent on just three songs, all in a row too—but album number one was not their greatest recorded moment.
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