Led Zeppelin – Physical Graffiti (1975) *****

What’s to like?

Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti has the honour of being this blog’s first Juke Box Jury choice for review, courtesy of nominations from Jim Colthart and Karen Stout – thanks guys!

The low down

Physical Graffiti – the very title comes across as a statement of intent. It was certainly Zeppelin’s boldest move at that point in their career, offering up a double album of new material in a beautifully packaged die-cut LP sleeve with interchangeable sleeve inserts making the whole thing feel special and unique. The music too, was some of the boldest the band created in their relatively short career.

They’d been slowly building up to this high point over previous albums, as the band’s music palette become more colourful with each successive release. Led Zeppelin III had seen the band build on their blues rock sound by introducing a whole side of acoustic guitar songs as a nod to their folk roots.

The fourth and fifth albums that followed showed their sound and inspirations continuing to broaden. The songs stretched out and breathed more, the band developed an empathic sense of groove and rhythm, swagger and strut, and yet still retained that gentle tenderness in the quietest of moments. Stairway To Heaven managed to encompass all of that in one song.

The confidence grew, no doubt due to the gruelling touring the band undertook, with lengthy shows allowing them to extend and improvise their songs beyond the accepted hard rock template. If Houses Of The Holy came up a little short in classic tracks after the legendary status accorded Led Zeppelin IV, it still showed the band pushing the envelope, refining the sound further with the lovely Rain Song or the epic No Quarter.

So expectations would be high when the band convened to record their next album, and they managed to come up with eight new songs:

Custard Pie, In My Time Of Dying, Trampled Underfoot, Kashmir, In The Light, Ten Years Gone, The Wanton Song, and Sick Again.

The problem was that the combined running time stretched beyond the typical length of an LP. The band were reluctant to discard any of the songs, and in my opinion rightly so as these are, for me at least, the highlights of the album. So Physical Graffiti became a double, which then meant that band leader, guitarist Jimmy Page, had to delve into his tapes and dig out tracks recorded for the previous albums but ultimately rejected.

These included Down By The Seaside, Night Flight, and Boogie With Stu (from Led Zeppelin IV), Houses of the Holy, The Rover, and Black Country Woman (from Houses Of The Holy) and the lovely acoustic interlude Bron Yr Aur was sourced from tapes recorded during Led Zeppelin III.

I gave the album another spin as I was writing my notes, and what turned out to be really interesting for me was that it became more apparent this time around which tracks were the newly recorded ones, and which were the leftovers. The tracks from the Graffiti sessions have a drive and energy behind them that is a wee bit lacking in the older material. And they sound better too.

Pagey wasn’t just a talented guitarist, he was a consummate producer and strived for the very best sound for his band’s albums. The fact that they still sound so good today, 40 years on, is a testament to the time and care he took with mixing them at the time. But even so, some Zep albums sound that little bit better than others, possibly because of the limitations of the equipment at the time, or the acoustics of the recording environment.

Physical Graffiti is one the band’s best sounding albums, with intense tracks like Kashmir and In My Time Of Dying thundering out of the speakers as befits their epic style. John Bonham’s drums sound HUGE.

Meanwhile the more reflective tracks like Ten Years Gone and In The Light have a warm and airy sound to them. Ten Years in particular is one the band’s most meticulously produced tracks as Page added layer upon layer of guitar lines in the song’s closing section, building as wide a stereo mix as possible to allow the listener to clearly pick out each new guitar line. It sounds superb on the headphones!

Even the more traditional rockers like Custard Pie and Trampled Underfoot have a clarity that allows even the background instruments to shine through, particularly John Paul Jones’ clavinet chords on Trampled. And that clarity captures every moan and groan of Robert Plant as he croons, wails and roars his throat into the mix before the tape runs out. Check out his little ad lib in the closing moments of In My Time Of Dying…..

In contrast, cuts like Houses Of The Holy and The Rover have a fuzziness about them that betray their earlier recording source. Not that they’re bad tracks in any way – far from it, and to be honest there’s not one dud on this album at all. But there is an almost throwaway vibe to them and the for me, the excitement level drops a notch inbetween the newer tracks. Same with Boogie With Stu and Night Flight. They’re fine rockers in their own right, but compared to the zing of newer efforts like The Wanton Song, you can see why they were left off the earlier albums.

Mind you, the previous album – Houses Of The Holy – might have benefitted from dropping misfiring duds like The Crunge and D’Yer Mak’er, and replacing them with the rejected tracks reinstated on Physical Graffiti!

Graffiti is probably forever fated to live in the shadow of Led Zeppelin IV, purely because that album has the band’s most popular song Stairway To Heaven. But in my view, Graffiti is the better album simply because the double length allows the band to show how diverse they could be when they were inspired to push the envelope. It’s got some of their best songs and I think it’s their best sounding album. Add in the dinky album sleeve design, which has been painstaking recreated for the recent cd reissue and it’s a complete winner.

If you’ve rarely heard the legend that is Led Zep, then I’d recommend you “get Physical”.