Top 100 Albums of the 1970s - #75 - Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy

Led Zeppelin always liked to experiment with different genres, but perhaps never so much as on their fifth album, Houses of the Holy, in which the band stretches itself beyond their hard rock/proto metal roots to create a record that enigmatic, fascinating, and at times brilliant.

What Houses of the Holy lacks in a unified sound or consistent themes, it makes up for in exuberance and experimentation. It's not always successful, but it does include some of the highlights of the Led Zeppelin catalogue.

The album's opener, The Song Remains the Same, is a traditional Jimmy Page guitar-workout rocker that is made no less powerful by its familiarity.  Next, The Rain Song finds the band in a mellower mood than is typical for them, with Jimmy Page's twin guitars separated out into the stereo channels, providing a wide and full sound that soon is joined by warm strings. By this point, Page's layered guitar technique was well established, but this is a good example of how far the band had come in terms of production, and really sounds great through headphones.

The Tolkien-influenced flights of fancy are still around, with songs like Over the Hills and Far Away preserving the Celtic influences that allowed Zeppelin to give a nod to its native Britain while still reveling the in the sounds of American blues. 

On the second half, things start to get a little odd. D'Yer Maker (pronounced Jamaica) is a particularly weird genre experiment in which the band attempts reggae. The result doesn't exactly sound like something out of the Caribbean, but it is a fun enough to forgive its technical and stylistic shortcomings. 

No Quarter is even weirder, but instead of being a pastiche, it comes across as a genuinely frightening piece of nightmare music. It also proves that Robert Plant can do things with his voice other than shriek. It's one of my favorite things the band has ever done, and resembles nothing else in their oeuvre.

Elsewhere, the songwriting suffers, as on the mediocre Dancing Days and The Crunge (did they ever find that confounded bridge?) But if Houses of the Holy is not as consistent as the previous album, it must at least be given credit for how adventurous it is. It's not my favorite Zeppelin album, but it's certainly up there. As Robert Plant says in the last two words on the album, "so good."