No "Black Dog" [in Presence], no "Kashmir" either. Yet though Presence doesn't bombingly pockmark the landscape or scale snowy Himalayan heights—even if Jimmy Page's guitar is becoming a riff Osterizer and Robert Plant's voice is shredding at the edges and tearing in the middle—still, Zeppelin has such command of heavy-metal weaponry that even their modest efforts have scorched-earth capability. When Zeppelin doesn't launch search-and-destroy missions into your neocortex it's because they don't want to, not because they can't. This album, a quickie recorded in eighteen days, lacks the fleetness of Houses of the Holy and the architectural density of Physical Graffiti, but in its best moments still manages to rattle the windowpanes.

"Achilles' Last Stand" for example is lengthy, too lengthy, and drivingly singleminded (a detour or two would have been nice), but is rescued by Plant's parched-throat chanting which gives the track a raw thrilling...