Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
To release a cover of a well-known hit song or personal favourite is considered a modern etiquette, the chance to acknowledge what has guided you, what has inspired you, what creativity has pushed you to the point where your own music is forever joined at the hip and acknowledged as a natural partner, is good manners and appreciated by artist and fan alike.
An odd song here and there, a lightly seasoned but still provocative statement and the fans are able to understand the momentum behind your thoughts and your own recordings. An album of such immense pressure, the weight of history behind it, the stress, the force of nature required to attain the same height as the musicians who first envisaged its conception, that is more than a sideways two- or three-minute compliment, it is a tribute, it is a full examination of your worth in the shadow of the one that you hold in esteem.
Beth Hart doesn’t shy away from a fight or a challenge, a woman of high honour herself, and it is with initial fascination, and then accolade that she tackles some of back catalogue of Britain’s Led Zeppelin in an album that sends shivers down the spine that in a way arguably the band could not achieve when they were the word on everybody’s lips and the favoured musicians in which to extoll the lengthy Blues/Rock riff.
A Tribute To Led Zeppelin is perhaps fittingly one created with, as the song suggests, created with a Whole Lotta Love, and yet unlike an assertion from the band, the song does not stay the same, and it is because of Beth Hart’s passionate, driving, and boisterous vocals that the tracks on the album are by definition and by access a wild stallion of music that in many ways could not be equalled by the original creators.
How does a tribute, lovingly and strictly observed become an idol in its own right, you could ask the same question of any art, and the answer could be down to design, due to re-invention, or just that in this particular case, Beth Hart’s voice, her raw anger and energy, and not withstanding the presence of her sexual dominance and magnetism, control the listener with intent and purpose. Whatever the reason, tracks such as Stairway To heaven, Black Dog, Good Times/ Bad Times, The Crunge, the forementioned A Whole Lotta Love, and a particularly stirring, indeed thrilling version of the classic Kashmir, are emotive, sensitive, crushing, brilliant.
It takes courage to pay tribute, to have authority over the original has mettle, audacity and resolution sewn through it as if the final production is a tapestry created by gods and presented to children at the foot of the mountain as proof of a higher belief. It is in this tribute that the works of Led Zeppelin finds a new home in the cradle of a woman who represents the 21st Century Blues Rock genre with pride, and for Beth Hart, it is the tapestry of life that will lead her on, urge her forward to the next, inevitably cool, project.
Beth Hart releases A Tribute To Led Zeppelin on February 25th via Provogue/ Mascot Label Group. Ian D. Hall