Led Zeppelin – Coda

Found this original Canadian in excellent shape, looks barely played. I also have the 2015 reissue and compared to that this is more raw and dynamic, more bass, more everything. Not a world of difference for this type of album that is a collection of different recordings from different time periods, but if you value the energy and dynamics from analog pressings, it should be easy to find an original like this.

The drum is soooo in your face! Being my first Zeppelin's album, it make me love Jon Bonham play.

This LP sounds fantastic, with great clarity & an ample dose of the essential Zeppelin whomp.

For their "coda" album, it's kind of a disappointment that it's a contractual release of outtakes and leftovers, put together by Jimmy Page after the death of Bonham in order to satisfy their label. It's short, disted, and plays like an album of cleaned-up outtakes, with uniform modern production techniques used to unify recordings that spanned over the decades. The majority of it is interesting and would have fit as an extra track here and there within their discography. I'm fine with it being a collection of outtakes, but I would have rather it was sold as such instead of it being presented as a studio album (though nobody was hiding that these recordings go back right to the early '70s all the way to just before Bonham's death). For all my griping of how it was released, "We're Gonna Groove" is as good as anything they released post-IV, and "Bonzo's Montreux" - at times more Page's piece with all of his electronic overdubs - is actually a far more engaging listen for all of Page's tinkering. I think if Coda hadn't been released, and a couple of tracks would have ended up here and there as bonus tracks on subsequent releases, that would have been fine. Inconsistent, but never disappointing, and sometimes illuminating. And it's mixed extremely well, with the drums coming through like a mutha!