LED ZEPPELIN IV

The fact that the general reception of "Led Zeppelin III" was not as expected, hit the band's self-esteem and especially Jimmy Page's, who considered it the best album of the three released up to that time. And so the fourth album, "Led Zeppelin IV" (although officially untitled by the musicians' decision), had a meticulous creative and production work to harmonise its intense hard rock vein with folk and blues influences.

The first part of the album is outstanding and there is nothing to be wasted, with pieces with the necessary ingredients to make up timeless anthems of the genre: Page's dense riffs in the lusty "Black Dog" and the incendiary "Rock and Roll", Celtic reminiscences in "The Battle of Evermore" with the contribution of Page on mandolin and English singer Sandy Denny, and the perfect electro-acoustic combination of the immortal "Stairway to Heaven" with the growing instrumental wall built by John Paul Jones and John Bonham and crowned by Page's portentous guitar solo and Plant's heartbreaking phrasing, one of the band's and the genre's flagship songs.

Although in the second half the rushed "Mystic Mountain Hop" marked by Jones' electric piano and the orientalised "Four Sticks" lag a little behind the rest of the pieces, "Going to California", a beautiful acoustic tribute to the Canadian singer Joni Mitchell, and the infallible blues of the parsimonious "When the Levee Breaks" (an adaptation taken from the American singer Memphis Minnie) interpreted in the way that only the British can do, maintain a superlative level and bring the work to a close.

The album of the portrait of the mysterious peasant hunched over with a bundle of branches on his back hanging on a peeling wall, would become one of the cornerstones of the genre and would raise the band to the top of the rock scene.

Excellent

4/4.5 stars