10 Bands To Listen To If You Love Led Zeppelin
5. Living Colour
Arriving twenty years after Led Zeppelin’s introductory collection, Vivid launched New York ensemble Living Colour as an impeccably dexterous force to be reckoned with. Building upon the funk, hard rock, and glam metal masters of the '70s and '80, they upheld not only their precursor’s gutsy musicianship but also their outstanding flexibility.
The album’s biggest hit, Cult of Personality, is the go-to example of this, yet a few other tunes (namely, Funny Vibe and Desperate People) also demonstrated how the group blended that core grittiness with plenty of vibrant musical tangents.
While their output has been relatively scarce in the last two decades, Living Colour never lost that zealousness.
Specifically, This Is the Life and Leave it Alone kept the concise fieriness going, whereas Visions was delightfully mystical and That’s What You Taught Me was movingly introspective.
According to guitarist Vernon Reid, even their latest studio work (2017’s Shade) was partially designed as an homage to how Zeppelin “reverse-engineered the blues”. He continues: ‘That’s sort of a model in my mind – not to sound at all like them. but taking things and turning them sideways”. Mission accomplished.