Led Zeppelin
Presence

THE REVIEW

The recent reunion of Led Zeppelin prompted me to listen again, after a few years of guilty neglect, to their albums, revisiting their work with different attention, perhaps cooling the passion I had for the band a decade ago, but allowing me to reflect more fairly on their contribution to the growth of rock music and its very development. Hence the need for my review of "Presence" (1976), fully aware that it is yet another contribution on the subject present on Debaser.

Probably their least known album, certainly the one least considered by critics along with the last "In Through the Outdoor," "Presence" shows us a band now devoid of the experimental and propulsive drive of the late '60s, forgetful of the soft hard of maturity, and at the same time seeking their roots, through a sort of palingenesis of sound, now dilated now even pompous, of the previous "Physical Graffiti".

Produced in just eighteen days, the album is probably the most direct and immediate of the four by the Zeppelins, characterized by an expressive urgency and a roughness of sound that had been rarely heard in their previous works, and which was completely abandoned in the ephemeral end of the English band's career.

It is, therefore, the authentic sonic testament of the band, a concluding reflection on the relationship between blues, hard rock, and ethnic influences of Zeppelin's sound, almost a compendium, hasty perhaps, certainly sincere, of their art.

At the same time, we cannot define it as an entirely successful work, given that the album features four standout songs, alongside entirely minor works, simple fillers. Forgoing the track by track, I thus leave a few essential notes - as essential as "Presence" is - on the three tracks I consider most interesting, just as the majority of the more authoritative critics on the subject have done.

The initial "Achilles Last Stand" opens the work optimally, constituting one of the best tracks in the career of the four. The song's interest lies entirely in Jimmy Page's guitar work, almost like an architecture that supports Robert Plant's declamatory singing: an arpeggio composed of few, hypnotic notes entwines into a crescendo of drama and unease, exploding after supporting the vocals into a solo of great sonic clarity, re-twisting the melody upon itself, and letting the (long) song fade into the diluted return of the initial theme. What strikes most about Page's guitar style is the ability to construct a song on extremely synthetic phrases, not pyrotechnic or characterized by the purely virtuoso showmanship of many rock guitarists, but closely functional to the compactness of the track: in the song's structure, Page's guitar occupies rhythmic and solo spaces, as well as harmonic ones sometimes attributed to the bass, allowing the bassist to focus on interplay with the drums, enhancing the percussive nervousness of the rhythm section. From this perspective, "Achilles..." reveals in watermark a maturation of Zeppelin's language and Page's assimilation of certain musical expressive forms from the African and Asian worlds, already explored especially in "Physical Graffiti": rhythm and harmony intertwine in hypnotic and repetitive textures, with a disorienting effect for the listener. 

The subsequent "For Your Life" is a résumé of a career, the revisitation of the hard blues of the origins, with all its typical stop and go and its elephantine progression, well supported by Bonham and Jones on drums and bass. Here Plant's voice becomes devilish - perhaps the best vocal performance on the record - declaiming verses now amused, now decadent. In this piece too, Page's guitar gives a full-bodied sound to the whole song, with continuous rhythmic and harmonic variations and an extremely precise solo.
It is certainly a mannered piece, neither original in its insights nor developments, yet Page demonstrates his qualities as a producer and probably a sound engineer: he shows us, in particular, how the sonic violence, the emotional impact of a track can be achieved through a mix aimed at emphasizing the sound of each individual instrument, almost dissecting it, rather than through the construction of a compact and uniform wall.

The last noteworthy track of the album is "Nobody's Fault But Mine", another revisitation of a traditional blues, with the addition of a sonic violence, of an irritating impact never heard in the band's tracks since the attack of "Led Zeppelin I".
Curiously, the sonic violence pairs with a track structure still dilated and varied, which starts with a distorted guitar, feeds on awkward rhythms almost like a bass and especially drum hiccup, to explode into the devilish singing that tells us about the perdition of the old bluesmen. The peak of the track is, however, in Page's two short hammering and concise guitar solos, where the guitar distorts almost to mimic a harmonica, yet reminds us, almost imperceptibly, of its almost metallic presence. Never had a Zeppelin track in the '70s been so straightforward, almost like an attack on the listener's hearing, never so direct, until it seemed the work of a debut group, well masked by veteran competence and craft.

As previously noted, the other tracks from the album are in my view irrelevant, and in any case well described in other reviews of "Presence" available on this and other sites, to which I obviously refer.

One last consideration: revisiting images of the three remaining Zeppelins in their recent reunion, I was struck by the stage presence of the three, the composure and clarity of musicians now over sixty: almost like a black obelisk on a dining table, our band still represents the benchmark for anyone wishing to innovate the rock blues musical language, an impassible and immobile presence in an eternal present.