Led Zeppelin II by Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin II is the second studio album by the English rock band Led Zeppelin, released in October 1969 on Atlantic Records. Recording sessions for the album took place at several locations in the United Kingdom and North America from January to August 1969. Production was entirely credited to lead guitarist and songwriter Jimmy Page, while it also served as Led Zeppelin's first album to utilise the recording techniques of engineer Eddie Kramer. Led Zeppelin II furthered the lyrical themes established on their debut album, creating a work that became more widely acclaimed and influential than its predecessor. With elements of blues and folk music, it also exhibits the band's evolving musical style of blues-derived material and their guitar and riff-based sound. It is considered the band's heaviest album. Upon release, Led Zeppelin II earned a considerable amount of sales and was Led Zeppelin's first album to reach No. 1 in the UK and the US. In 1970, art director David Juniper was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package for the album. On 15 November 1999, it was certified 12x Platinum by the RIAA for sales in excess of 12 million copies. Following its initial reception, it has been recognised by writers and music critics as one of the greatest and most influential rock albums ever recorded. Along with the group's self-titled debut album and their next album, Led Zeppelin III, the album was remastered and reissued by Page at the start of 2014. The reissue comes in 5 formats: a standard CD edition, a deluxe 2 CD edition, a standard LP version, a deluxe 2 LP version, and a super deluxe 2 CD+2 LP version with a hardback book. The deluxe and super deluxe editions feature bonus material containing alternative takes, backing tracks and a previously unreleased song, "La La"
Years after <i>Led Zeppelin IV</i> became one of the most famous albums in the history of rock music, Robert Plant was driving toward the Oregon Coast when the radio caught his ear. The music was fantastic: old, spectral doo-wop—nothing he’d ever heard before. When the DJ came back on, he started plugging the station’s seasonal fundraiser. Support local radio, he said—we promise we’ll never play “Stairway to Heaven”. Plant pulled over and called in with a sizable donation. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the song, he said later. He’d just heard it plenty before.<br /> It hangs together well enough as an album. But the real beauty of <i>IV</i> is as a collection of seeds, each sprouting in a different direction: gentle folk (“Going to California”) and nasty blues (“Black Dog”), the epic (“Stairway to Heaven”) and the concise (“Rock and Roll”). That fans have fought for years over the album’s perfect moment (it’s “When the Levee Breaks”) is a testament not only to the passion the band inspires, but also to how perfectly they capture their own internal yins and yangs. An entire ecosystem of music could be built on the songs here. And it was.<br /> Overstated? Yes—there are times when <i>IV</i> seems to exist to ask why you would overdub one guitar when you could overdub four. But if the flowery stuff doesn’t work for you (“The Battle of Evermore”), the dirty stuff (“Misty Mountain Hop”) probably will, and if you prefer your symphonies to stay in the concert hall, the band still sweats, pounds and moans enough to scandalise company at levels polite and otherwise. The irony of <i>IV</i> is that it opened a new world for hard rock by embracing the colour and variety of its natural enemy: pop.
