Greta Van Fleet “Anthem of the Peaceful Army” Album Review
Originally Published: 10/29/2018
Score: 3/10
If you went to high school in the suburbs, you definitely had a few friends in rock bands. Or maybe you just knew kids who were in rock bands. Either way, DIY rock bands existed plentifully in my suburb. The kids would be really talented musicians, but their music had no soul. They were good musicians, but not good artists. They could physically, objectively play music well, but their compositions lacked character, individuality, cohesion, identity, and precision of any kind. Basically, they sounded like skilled amateurs. All they did was mimic everything about bands such as Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, or The Rolling Stones, and played the style very well at a technical level. These were the kinds of kids you could see getting hired by a marketing company to help perform a jingle, or be part of an ensemble to recite music. Or maybe even be a group who played at local pubs and dive bars for a couple of extra bucks. Some may even become music teachers of various kinds. None of those hobbies or professions are bad at all. Maybe in their early days you bought a demo of theirs or saw a show for support. But nobody really expects these kinds of acts to blow up at all. They’re just average, completely middling acts, and know this. There’s nothing to them that identifies them as their own unique entity, and exist for cheap entertainment value. This entertainment value is usually relegated to proud parents watching their children harken back to the days of old in a local park at a talent show, or a few drunken patrons of a virtually nameless dive bar singing along to the oldies while they strum through the arrangement. Again, totally fine, but not much is to be expected here.
But if there’s one thing that you can pretty much constantly bank on, as the 2000s rock scene showed us all too abundantly, if you persevere with Led Zeppelin emulation for long enough, and do it well enough, you will find an audience that can pay your bills. Moreover, now that rock has fallen out of favor as the mainstream genre dujour, rock elitists are clutching their vinyl more fervently than ever, swatting away the perilous evils of genres that aren’t guitar centric and nontraditional rock music alike. This increasingly shrinking group of people are desperately looking for a modern act to fill that void of 70s hard rock idolatry that was filled to the brim the past decade. One of these suburban cover bands, from bumblefuck Michigan no less, inevitably caught onto this, and pushed until they got what they wanted, and became this decade’s token Zep worship band. This band is Greta Van Fleet.
This album is the equivalent to buying one of those off-brand cereal brands that looks exactly like the original, is branded just close enough so that they can’t get sued, and is just edible enough so that it is completely inoffensive. It’s not even as good as store brand though, this is a thoroughly below par cereal, but just isn’t inedible. That being said, this sort of cereal is good for one bowl at most. You’d never want to subject yourself to this kind of blatant, unflinching mediocrity again, even if it’s as innocuous as a breakfast decision. You’d just rather the actual cereal or a similar cereal hand over fist, not one that is looks like it but is missing the enjoyability of it.
This is how Greta Van Fleet’s “Anthem of the Peaceful Army” is. From the top down I can tolerate this album. The instrumentation is definitely sound, but the composition is utterly devoid of any sort of uniqueness. I automatically think the drums sound like a really competent take on Bonham, I automatically think the vocalist is a makeshift Plant, and so forth. But none of it is quite good enough to stack up to anything Zeppelin ever achieved at their best. The songwriting is minimal and bland, the song structure is generic and uninspiring, and the instrumentation is a carbon-pressing of Zeppelin’s music. The vocalizing is the most egregious bite of Zeppelin’s sound however, and crosses over into being offensively thieving. Really, by the end of this record, all of these absolutely blatant Zeppelin bites go from individually innocuous to collectively obnoxious. Whether these guys are in a truly unflinching, delusional, wide-eyed love for Led Zeppelin so much so that they would steal everything about their sound and evolve none of it, or are blistering calculating their emulation to widen profits is beyond me. What I do know is that the end result is one of, if not the single most, cynical bites of the band’s aesthetic to date, and that is saying quite a fucking lot given the last two or so decades of rock music that has mimicked their style.
What I like about the dorky cover bands from random suburbs that worship the music their parents listened to is that they make no mistake about where they stand artistically. These are just goofy, nerdy kids playing music they like. And good for them, performing music and engaging oneself creatively is a great way to relieve stress, meet new people, entertain yourself, and practice discipline by way of practice and recitation. But for those few who get a little too cocky and start feeling themselves, they become tools. And when they blow up, they just become annoying. I don’t think I hate this band, and I’m sure the members are just extremely dorky kids who love Zeppelin a lot, but I still can’t help but really, really dislike this record. There’s nothing to it that I can’t get somewhere else at a much higher grade, and for the same price. Given this, I’d really rather just buy the name brand.
