Album Review: Greta Van Fleet - "The Battle At Garden's Gate"

 

For weeks it's been sat there in my review pile. Goading me. As if to say "c'mon Andy, review me, let some bile loose, I double dog dare ya". Until now I had resisted - these days as a veteran reviewer of two decades plus, I tend to simply skip past albums I'm not fond of without reviewing them as most of the time it's just not worth the arguments it inevitably causes. Sometimes though, the vitriol just gets to the point where it has to be unleashed. And, make no mistake, The Battle At For Fuck's Sake Even The Title Of This Bloody Thing Sounds Like A Led Zeppelin B-Side is one of those times.

The thing about Greta Van Fleet is, it's a bit harsh to criticise bands for slyly thieving the odd influence here and there - let's face it, if we held all our musicians up to that mirror then 99.999% of them would be guilty going right back to the Stones filching a lot of their early ideas from Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. And let's be honest, bands blatantly ripping off Led Zep is nothing new - in the early '90s we had Kingdom Come and in the noughties we had Wolfmother and both of them were pretty much roundly laughed out of the building in short order (as, one would hope, would happen to GVF in due course).

No, what makes this band so dreadful is the fact that they're not even a particularly good Led Zep rip-off. It feels like they've basically just skim-listened through Plant and Page's back catalogue, hurriedly made a few notes and thought "Yup, that'll sort it". They're no gentleman thieves, more a group of slack-jawed cutpurses whacking grannies on the head and nicking their pension books. Hence we get them blundering through material like Built By Nations (basically an Aldi version of Kashmir), twee folky songs like Broken Bells which is a third rate Ramble On and a "really lads, this was unnecessary" nine minute prog metal snoreathon called The Weight Of Dreams showing all the originality of a xerox machine throughout. And when you're basically a one-trick pony in terms of what you're ripping off and your singer isn't as good as Robert Plant nor your guitarist as good as Jimmy Page, you have to ask what exactly is the point. The only sign of any musical progress from their equally dreadful debut Anthem Of The Peaceful Army is an attempt to go slightly grungy with Caravel which instead of sounding like an utterly half-baked Zep rip-off ends up sounding like an utterly half-baked Soundgarden rip-off. Yay for progress, eh?

As for the lyrics - yeesh. I mean when you get sub-Spinal Tap lines like "There are so many people/Some are much younger people and some are so old" on the laughable lead off single My Way Soon, you can't help but start looking around for a Darkness style punchline. But frighteningly, there isn't one. Garden's Gate is the rock equivalent of the Daily Mail - hopelessly tied in to The Old Ways of doing things, innately suspicious of any sort of deviation from the Correct Rock Path from punk onwards and would rightfully be obsolete if there weren't so many people who are mystifyingly still entranced by it. The harsh truth is though that despite what Greta Van Fleet and their backward-looking ilk like musical uber-gammon Noel "keep the rappers out of Glasto" Gallagher and his High Flying Birds, Blackberry Smoke, the Cadillac Three and pretty much every hackneyed exponent of the walking oxymoron that is the New Wave of Classic Rock want to believe, rock music is like a shark. It needs to keep moving forward and evolving or else it dies - you cannot simply try and put it under a glass dome and hope to god no-one else will touch it. And if you really are one of those "keep rock music trad!" people then I urge, no implore you to go out and listen to the Wildhearts' Renaissance Men album, an awesome collection of songs which take the traditional rock template and twist it into a whole cavalcade of weird and wonderful new forms to brilliant and thrilling effect with killer riffs and tunes to boot and compare and contrast it with this dull grey clodhopping dead duck of an album. The difference couldn't be clearer. When Greta Van Fleet are rightfully left behind in the dust as rock music speeds off forwards without them, they will have no-one to blame but themselves.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌒🌒🌒🌑🌑🌑🌑🌑🌑🌑 (3/10)