Music Review: Led Zeppelin The Mothership

By Matt Rosser, '17

Logo by Megan Lacombe

Led Zeppelin was never much of a singles band.  From 1969 on, guitarist Jimmy Page was happy that the group's LPs not be mucked up with filler, so most of their releases contain only between eight and ten tracks. Led Zeppelin's legacy significantly shaped the next four decades of rock'n'roll and heavy metal that to discount any one of those tracks seemed stupid. Twelve years of intense self-editing meant that Led Zeppelin required no best-of. I'm sure that when fans hear about the releasing of Mothership, they tried effortlessly to scrounge up any money that they had to buy this record. I was doing just that when this album came out.

Photo credit: Amazon.com

           Mothership-- a collection of 24 of Led Zeppelin's "greatest hits," remastered and selected by the band's three remaining members (Page, as well as Robert Plant and John Paul Jones)-- might be conceptually flawed, but it's hard to argue against songs as great as these. Early Days and Latter Days(a similar greatest hits album) has a tracklist similar to Mothership (the latter adds "D'yer Mak'er", "Over the Hills and Far Away", "Heartbreaker", and "Ramble On", but loses "Ten Years Gone", "What Is and What Should Never Be," and "The Battle of Evermore.” They are both quite similar also, they both come with 2 cd’s. So you don’t just get one cd of rock ‘n’ roll greatness, but TWO. Almost like a two for one deal!

        The remastering on Mothership is honestly fantastic. I'm really happy they put it out.Led Zeppelin sound as tremendous in 2007 (when Mothership was released) as they did in 1972.