Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV

...Davis, who's a regular contributor to Wired, spins an irresistible narrative about his rediscovery of the classic album while driving through England, tying the songs in with pagan myth and feminine representation. Far from being pretentious, Davis' meditation is charming and readable. * Philadelphia Weekly * The most engaging aspect of this irresistibly readable book is the sheer delight Davis so obviously takes in over reading this stuff. It's as if he went through some hermeneutic wormhole and emerged in a parallel universe where Zep's legendary fourth album is infinitely dense with significance-a textual black hole that sucks all meaning into its dark maw.. -- Mark Dery * Shovelware * ...the literary equivalent of sparking the owl, crafting a sigil, cranking up a back-masked copy of Stairway to Heaven, and settling in for a deep chat with the collective satanic majesties of visionary rock. -- Richard Gehr * Village Voice * The most ingenious aspect of this book, even if you're not literate in mysticism and the occult, is that Davis intentionally and deliberately over-analyzes the entire album...That's the point. It's almost like reaching over to your bookshelf, pulling out the entire Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series and applying them to Four Sticks ...you can tell that Davis had an absolute blast with this whole project. * Metro NY, August 2005 * The most intellectually inspired and flat-out fun of Continuum's ongoing 33 1/3 series of pocketbook album appreciations, critic Davis's adventurous treatise decodes every magical property embedded within rock's most geeked-on masterpiece. * Blender * ...most likely destined to a fate of cult favorite, Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis soars the heights of some very rarefied air indeed. -- Joe Pettit * Ugly Things * Even when Erik Davis published his exegesis on Led Zeppelin's IV in 2005, there seemed to be little left to say about either the band or its best-selling album. Yet the best 33? titles can make you hear familiar albums with fresh ears. Davis has some fun unpacking the rumors of occultic messages hidden in the packaging and in the music (backmasking! mirrored images! Crowley references!), yet he acknowledges the power of the band's particular mythology to cast a strong spell over even the most skeptical listener. The result, he writes, is 'one of the supreme paradoxes of rock history: an esoteric megahit, a blockbuster arcanum. -- Stephen M. Deusner * Pitchfork *