Album Review: Train — Does Led Zeppelin II
Of all the legions of faceless, post-alternative rock bands who roamed the American musical landscape in the back-end of the 90’s, few could have foreseen Train as being perhaps the most durable. The band didn’t sell millions upon millions of records like Matchbox Twenty, didn’t have a gift for a pop hook like Third Eye Blind, and they had no link to rock royalty like the Jakob Dylan-led The Wallflowers.
Instead Train were the equivalent of a 70s working band- clever enough to have a couple of hit singles, and then destined seemingly to mine these on the road and on subsequent records for a few more years before fading back into obscurity.
Contrary to expectations Train somehow rode out the hard times at the turn of the millennium, and at the exact point where trad-rock bands were pushed into complete extinction on the pop charts, had a bigger hit then ever via the ingratiating Hey Soul Sister.
That hit not only kept the band around into the 2010’s — it gave them a license to do pretty much as they pleased. A couple more albums swinging for the pop charts (with mixed results) appeared, along with a Christmas album.
Then, inexplicably in mid-2016 appeared Does Led Zeppelin II. As the name quite literally suggests this is the band re-creating the Zep’s second record some 45 years after its original release. And re-creating is the right term for what Train attempt here — this is the aural equivalent of Gus Van Sant’s scene-by-scene reconstruction of Psycho. Train take great pains to mimic every aspect of the source material for no apparent reason other than the fact that they can.
To say this project is confusing is an understatement. It’s almost impossible to discern who such a record is for. People who call themselves Train fans in 2016 likely have little to no interest in Led Zeppelin, while Zeppelin fans are not going to want to hear a group like Train take on Ramble On or Heartbreaker. All the more perplexing is the selection of Led Zeppelin II as the Zeppelin record to cover— an album recorded quickly on breaks between being on the road, and littered with riff heavy songs which often crib from blues classics. This is not the kind of music any casual observer would associate with Train — who’s breakthrough hit Drops of Jupiter if anything sounded more like Madman Across the Water era Elton John, than any sort of hard rock.
What is surprising is that Train pull off the sound of Led Zeppelin with ease — Pat Monahan does a pretty good Robert Plant impersonation, and guitarist Jimmy Stafford layers guitars precisely just like Jimmy Page back in the day — and in fact very rarely deviates from the exact arrangements, solos and all, of the original songs.
So tasteful and precise is the mimicry, that it is occasionally possible to forget you are listening to Train. While that seems like damning the album with feint praise, this in fact cuts to the core problem with the album — Train strip away any of the character that they do have, and simply operate as a very good Zep tribute band. This renders the record so devoid of character that it is hard to see even the most devoted fan going back for repeat listens.
Perhaps fundamentally the concept of this album is flawed, but it’s hard not to wish Train had thrown some of their own trademarks into the mix here. Undoubtedly if strummed ukuleles, bizarre nonsensical lyrics and a shameless modern pop sheen had been applied to the project it would have been a train wreck, but at least it would have been an interesting train wreck, something that Does Led Zeppelin II is most certainly not.
