With black Dog, Rock’n’Roll, stairway to Heaven And When the dike breaks, present on his fourth work, Led Zeppelin had the wind in his sails. The album houses of the saintthat followed, celebrating its 50th anniversary, received mixed reviews for its musical diversity, but fans embraced it and propelled the British quartet to new heights.
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This was the London quartet’s fifth studio album, released on March 28, 1973, topping the charts in Australia, Canada, the United States and Great Britain. Sales totaled 12.5 million copies.
Photo from Wikipedia
On this album, released 16 months after Led Zeppelin IV, we find the tracks The Song Remains The Same, The Rain Song, Over The Hills and Far Away, No Quarter and D’yer Mak’er.
Houses of the Holy is considered the 278th greatest album of all time by Rolling Stone Magazine.
Experiment
Directed by guitarist Jimmy Page, this opus continues Led Zeppelin’s exploration and departure from the rawer tones of his first records.
Personal studio owners, guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones experiment with different sounds before entering the studio. Synths, mellotron (The Rain Song), clavinet (Over the Hills and Far Away) and electric piano are present on No Quarter.
The group shows up with elaborate versions in the studio. “Led Zep” surprises fans with The Crunge, featuring funk sounds inspired by James Brown. D’yer Mak’er is influenced by Jamaican reggae and dub. These two tracks, like the first single Dancing Days, lacked unanimous support compared to The Song Remains the Same, The Rain Song and No Quarter, which would become highlights of the band’s concerts.
A record
In an interview published in Guitar World magazine in November 2022, guitarist Jimmy Page revisited the group’s intentions for the Houses of the Holy opus.
“I found it important that every Led Zeppelin album sounds different than the previous album. All changes were intentional and that’s why we worked with different engineers and different studios.
The tour following the release of Houses of the Holy broke records. The quartet performs in amphitheaters and stadiums across the United States. Led Zeppelin beat that of The Beatles, which formed in 1965 at Shea Stadium in New York with a crowd of 56,800 at Tampa Stadium in Florida.
During this tour, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and the late John Bonham filmed three concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York for the film and live album The Song Remains the Same, to be released in 1976.
Houses of the Holy is the last record to be released on Atlantic before Led Zeppelin founded the Swan Song Records label. The cover is the first made for the quartet by the Hipgnosis company, using a photograph taken at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland.