More of the Music of Led Zeppelin
Reviews and Commentaries for Houses of the Holy
This is another one of the VERY BAD records Michael Fremer put on his 2009 Top LP list, while passing over one of Classic’s better titles: the first Led Zeppelin album. (We don’t like it as much as we used to, but it is still a good record if you get a good pressing of it, something that can never be guaranteed. We link to our review of it below.)
Michael Fremer’s web site used to be called called musicangle (now defunct). On this site you would have been able to find a feature called “157 In-Print LPs You Should Own!”
Surprisingly the link still works! If I had made a list this misguided, it would have become a Live and Learn commentary, out of sheer embarrassment if for no other reason. But back to our story.
I can’t begin to count the bad records on this list.
There are scores of them — albums that are so bad that we actually created an Audiophile Hall of Shame section to help you avoid them.
But Michael Fremer holds just the opposite view; he thinks these are records you should own. Now I suppose we can disagree over the merits (or lack of them) of a title such as Houses of the Holy on Classic (reviewed here). It’s a free country after all.
But the reason this list does such positive harm to the record-loving audiophile public, in my opinion, is that MF passes over one of the best records Classic ever cut, Led Zeppelin’s Self-Titled First Album, in order to put the ridiculously bright and aggressive Classic Houses of the Holy on the list in its place.
This is further evidence, as if more were needed, of two things that I believe are true for audiophile reviewers in general:
- None of them appear to be able to tell when a specific pressing of an album sounds bad. From this fact it follows that:
- None of them must be able to tell when a specific pressing of a given record sounds good.
Other than that they are doing their jobs just fine. They are paid to get audiophiles to buy audiophile magazines and go to audiophile websites and youtube channels. Mission accomplished.
In the area of helping audiophiles find good sounding records and avoid bad ones, they are failing miserably and have been for a very long time.
In these four words we can describe the sound of the average Classic Records pressing.
Not all Heavy Vinyl pressings are as bad sounding as Houses of the Holy. We favorably review some of the better ones here.
Reviewer malpractice? We’ve been writing about it since the ’90s.
If you want to know more about Houses of the Holy, you can learn a lot by cleaning and playing a big pile of copies. That’s how we did it and what works for us can work for you.