Jack Russell's Great White
Great Zeppelin II A Tribute to Led Zeppelin

So, Great Zeppelin II, the first was released a long time ago when Jack’s band Great White (from which he eventually was sacked) made a live recording of Zeppelin songs. Now, many years later Jack’s new version of Great White does a sequel with studio recording of Zeppelin songs. What strikes me when researching Russell and his new band is that in close to a decade they have released one single studio album and now lately looked back in time with some acoustic stuff related to an old album last year and now even older stuff with Led Zeppelin covers. This is of course an attempt to capitalise from their own fans and on the Led Zeppelin name, there is nothing musical or creative in the approach and the tribute to Zeppelin is only to use the name, otherwise this would have been a bonus disk on a studio album of their own songs.

Musically this sounds like Led Zeppelin in many ways, with a more modern and more glammy sound. Jack Russell has a voice that is pretty close to Robert Plante known as the vocalist of the original Zeppelin, this also makes the songs mostly quite similar to the original. There are of course differences but at first glance they are really similar, nothing really original or fresh about them. With a playing time of over the hour it is a bit much to listen through the CD, the vinyl is way more sensible in that regard. Then it is of course hard to see what these kind of tribute albums really offer; they are rarely of the same calibre as the original and even more rarely brings anything fresh to the table – this is no exception. It feels a tad lazy to just make an album of covers, it doesn’t really demand anything from you as an artist.

This album gives me the same feeling as Led Zeppelin usually does, I don’t really think Zeppelin has done any album that is really special. But they have made a few absolutely outstanding songs, like Kashmir which is one of my favourite songs ever – and it is fine in Russell’s version as well. Stairway to Heaven is another one of those timeless classics that will always work, but in the end there are also dull songs like Whole Lotta Love or Communication Breakdown that might have been special at their time but time hasn’t been very kind to those songs and they are just as daft when I hear them on this album.

In the end we get a group of good songs, but we also get an album that feels lazy and mostly quite meaningless. The best songs are excellent and maybe they make it worthwhile, but the album itself is quite indifferent and doesn’t really do much at all. So you can keep a few songs and discard the rest, so it is not really a great or interesting album.

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