By the time the band go 'full rock', with Plant's powerful almost-falsetto vocals laying the rock blueprint from everyone from Dio to, well, other bands with Dio in them, you're carried along with the tune's power and momentum – something a good system will facilitate. When the drums come in, your hi-fi should render the extra textures elegantly while losing none of the frequencies or muddying any of the instrumental strands from the gentler opening section. In the opening section, Page's famous finger-picked arpeggio'd guitar should feel crisp and clear, and through a sufficiently talented system you'll hear his fingers move on the fretboard, while the soothing recorder parts sing gently below it. How could we not? As a test of dynamics, Zep's most famous track offers up so many flavours it is sure to give your stereo a demanding but also fair test of its talents. Any good hi-fi system will have no trouble conveying the track's excitement for the duration of a song that does not feel as long as its ten-minute running time would suggest. Plant's dextrous eastern-influenced vocal wails will keep your midrange busy, and if your listening position is just right, the soundstage created by all these potentially competing elements will sound nicely composed. Here though Jones uses a pick to create a harder, more defined edge to the bass note transients (important in defining all those rapid, galloping string plucks) – and listen carefully and through a hi-fi talented in separating the sonic registers you can pick out a second, more 'regular' and deeper bassline, added to balance out the slightly brighter main riff. It's a fast and furious ride, driven by Bonham's powerful drumming and Jones' galloping bassline, with a feel not unlike the (much shorter) Immigrant Song. There's a lot going on here, not least with Page's multiple guitar overdubs, and to avoid the track sounding messy, your hi-fi should be able to pick apart and organise all the different strands to the point where you may just hear something new with every listen, while crucially keeping everything locked in. One of the band's most complex, epic and hard-charging songs. The interplay between the guitars and drums here is both raw and tricky, as the time signature swaps between one bar of 4/4 time and one in 7/8, making it a good test of your system's timing too. Then there's that guitar riff – the one sampled by the Beastie Boys on She's Crafty. It was supposed to be something whereby you could hear everything that was going on." Through a good system then you should clearly hear Bonham counting the band in at the start, and be able to pick out distinct voices in the a cappella section and the "doo-wops" when the track switches to a bouncy doo-wop boogie. In a 2015 interview with Uncut magazine, Page said of The Ocean's recording: "You can hear detail on it because that's what you're supposed to do. This is a great test of your system's detail resolution, not least because of the band's desire that the listener should hear everything going on in the recording. James Brown-parodying The Crunge and the cod-reggae of D'Yer Maker were hardly their best work, but the similarly tongue-in-cheek The Ocean remains one of their finest grooves. The Ocean (Houses Of The Holy)īy the time Zeppelin recorded their fifth album, the band were so big, so confident and possibly so arrogant they were hopping styles and pastiching other genres in a way that could have veered dangerously close to corny in the hands of lesser talent. Top marks then to an analytical hi-fi set-up, but let's not forget that groove – if your system can't dance, the infectious riff and bouncing bass just won't sound so much fun. So Page and producer Eddie Kramer duly cranked up the reverb and left it in, a happy mistake. There's a cough right at the start, and listen carefully at around the 4:00 mark and you can hear bleedthrough from a previous vocal track that couldn't be removed from the tape. The main riff should sound tight and together through a good system, even as Page throws in more techniques and recording trickery, such as backwards echo and stereo panning. One of 7" single-eschewing Zeppelin's most famous songs in the UK, thanks to being the theme tune to Top Of The Pops (with extra jazz flute! And Pan's People dance troupe!), Whole Lotta Love is based around a simple, tasty guitar and bass riff, with multiple overdubs such as that 'airplane passing overhead' descending guitar slide before "gotta whole lotta love". One of the many enduring qualities of Led Zeppelin's recordings is that, experimental as Jimmy Page was, he also liked to leave in little mistakes too – giving even their most thoughtful recordings a warmer, human quality.
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