I'm going to start this out by saying I really enjoy Led Zeppelin II. It is one of my favorite albums, and I'm not too particularly familiar with Train outside of their Drops of Jupiter song.
I am currently listening to Train Does Led Zeppelin II.
It's pretty underwhelming so far.
Underwhelming, but not so bad as to declare "all life to be bullshit" like the article I read on this a couple of months ago declared.
Anyway.
Whole Lotta Love is just plain underwhelming. The vocals are off, the guitar is off enough to throw me off. I almost turned the album off after the first minute and a half, but decided that wouldn't be fair.
What Is and What Should Never Be AND The Lemon Song were pretty unexciting. The first is a decent, slow moving song, but the second has some moments where the song should jump out and grab your attention. This one really didn't.
Thank You is probably the best sounding track on the whole album, and I suspect that may be because it sounds the closest to the original out of everything.
There has been something bothering me about what little I had heard of it, but couldn't quite place my finger on it. I have it now. Track 5, Heartbreaker is what tipped me off. The guitar just sounds wrong. Someone gave me a copy of Dred Zeppelin's Un-Led-Ed (link to Amazon Page), and the guitar in Train's cover sounds like it is tuned pretty much exactly like that one. Which was one of the reasons I did not care too much for that album.
The guitar stands out more in the beginning after listening for it, but the first few notes of that particular song are where it stands out the most.
Some of the articles and reviews I read for this train album claim that it is a "note for note recreation" of II. In some ways it is true to form, in other ways it is not. She's Just A Woman's opening line sounds (on the original) like he is more or less saying "fip cent hat", whereas Pat actually goes so far as to say "fifty cent hat" and it really doesn't flow correctly with the pacing of the song.
I feel like they probably went with the actual wording and everything of the album, as opposed to going for the full feel of everything with the shortcuts and whathaveyou that made it flow as well as it does.
Ramble On is decent though.
Moby Dick is Moby Dick. Enough said.
Bring It On Home...What am I hearing? It sounds like the microphone is in his mouth or something? The second part of the song's instruments sound pretty much on par with what is expected though.
All in all, not the worst album I have ever heard. I imagine it is like any Led Zeppelin album...Better heard in concert, but I have no desire to see Train in concert, so I guess that is it.
I realize there will be a whole lotta people who are being exposed to this material for the first time via Train, so there is that. But do yourself a favor.
Go buy the original.
