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Track Listing: Good Times Bad Times Babe I'm Gonna Leave You You Shook Me Dazed And Confused Your Time Is Gonna Come Black Mountain Side Communication Breakdown I Can't Quit You Baby How Many More Times

*I'm aware that I'm quite a few days late with this write-up, but screw it. I ain't gonna wait another 11 months to do this on the next anniversary.*

From the ashes of The Yardbirds rose Led Zeppelin as Jimmy Page recruited Plant, Jones and Bonham as his band mates, and it was evident from the beginning itself that this was going to very much be a band with equal contributions from each member, rather than a band with a sole creative force and a bunch of hired guns. But such an arrangement would require a tremendous level of creative talent, an attribute these four legends possessed in abundance.

Even though their songs were distinctly heavy from the outset as proven by this album, all of them revolved around a beautiful guitar melody. This was the very foundation of heavy metal as we know it, and the roots of almost all guitar-oriented heavy music that came to exist subsequently, can be traced back to Zeppelin. Whether or not they were rightly categorized as a heavy metal band themselves based on this album is a topic of debate and one's personal opinion, Led Zeppelin's debut was quite astonishingly far ahead of its time.

Their experimentation with a wide range of guitar sounds and various additional instruments is evident in quite a few of the songs here, and turned out to be a method they continued to apply throughout their illustrious career. But their overall sound progressed massively with every album. For this debut, they built upon a purely blues-laden foundation and ended up composing a powerfully heavy album that sounds psychedelic during some parts and grippingly melodic during others.

Another unique aspect of Zeppelin that was applied right from the start was the notion of album oriented rock. No band has ever done it better than them. As you move through listening to this album, you'd feel a strong sense of connection between the tunes, as if they were all meticulously threaded together to convey a joint message. They never believed in singles, and quite honestly I never did either. I never bought a single in my life and an album with just good "singles" isn't a good album, in my eyes anyway.

As with most debut albums that were being released at the time, this one consists of covers, as many as three of them. "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" was originally written by Anne Bredon, a folk singer based out of Berkeley, California. "You Shook Me" and "I Can't Quit You Baby" were Willie Dixon's compositions. But somehow even these also sound like native Zeppelin tunes and completely feel like integral portions of the album, which is pleasantly strange.

The first of many spellbinding pieces of art by Led Zeppelin, the self-titled album is a glorious set of nine tunes that I know I'll enjoy for the rest of my life.