Greta Van Fleet

And Greta Van Fleet are not the usual type of target for a negative review in a prominent publication

this band isn't a past-their-prime easy target but they're certainly an easy target

Omar OTM re: the RS review. I also noted the slight of not even reviewing the LP on its own, but combining it in a “twofer” review (or does RS do that a lot now)?

totally w/in the wheelhouse of pitchfork target bands, cf jet

personally as a fan of music i think if the just had a singer who didn't sound like he was trying so hard to be robert plant & just had his own personality/persona this whole thing would go down a lot easier, but it does feel like cosplay at this point...maybe hes a star tho & his personality will come to the forefront by the time they've got records in top 40... young thug was a wayne biter until he wasnt, uzi was a keef biter til he wasnt, etc.

i mean the clothes are pretty cartoony, they look like they're putting on a high school production of We Will Rock You

They definitely seem like the sort of band that will tour a bunch then shell out for a bunch of hitmakers to write their next album. Like, I dunno, Danger Mouse or Desmond Child or something.

surprised to not see any Dio comparisons for the singer as yet - which he definitely resembles physically if not quite vocally

just went outside to get lunch and there was a dude in a tech uniform with long curly hair and earbuds furiously headbanging on the sidewalk. Greta Van Fleet fan in the wild obv.

I hear both Plant and Dio in the singer's voice, but some of his stage mannerisms are cribbed straight from The Song Remains The Same (little left-hand flourishy thingy Plant did/GvF guy does).

And the drummer's kit is a carbon copy of Bonham's setup.

yeah he doesn't *quite* have Dio's range/pipes but who does. also doesn't have Dio's lovable and full-bore commitment to theatricality but whatever

i heard a zep song on the radio today and realized i have mentally categorized zep-inspired bands as "(male) crotch rock" for as long as i can remember. probably since the late 80s?

Anyone remember Deep Jimi & the Zep Creams? From Iceland though they were discovered bumming around NYC if memory serves. The name alone says all you needed to know, but this song off their album put out by Atco (a major label!) in 1992 connects the dots as well. It was produced by Kramer, which is pretty unexpected.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=7n1DUU5QSeI

Our own beloved Ned Raggett reviewed it for AMG, calling it "Uneven, but still worth a good smirk or two."

I think I still have the cassette at home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n1DUU5QSeI&feature=youtu.be

interesting interview w/greta van fleet's singer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaRmg77Ud48

lmao

How did this band not just call itself Kiszka?

I'm more confused by the fact that the letters GvF suggest all kinds of cool logo possibilities...and they lazily went with the Stranger Things font.

I feel like the Lemon Twigs are a good point of comparison in how to do outright retro thievery, to a comparable degree, without making anyone angry. (Similar age range, too, I think.) Though you could argue they've gotten away with it by simply ripping off hipper touchstones (the Zombies, etc instead of Zep)

Probably too obvious to mention, but if this had been your standard lukewarm, 7.4, "this-album-of-music-exists-and-we-are-bothering-to-acknowledge-it-for-whatever-reason" review none of us would be talking about it

this checks too many boxes of "things Pitchfork likes to think they are in opposition to" for them not to go after it

Kiszka

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCFBef0NhDY

They definitely seem like the sort of band that will tour a bunch then shell out for a bunch of hitmakers to write their next album. Like, I dunno, Danger Mouse or Desmond Child or something.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 25, 2018 10:20 AM

Has Max Martin produced a pure rock album? Bet he might want to take that on as a challenge

thank you josh, i've had that song running through my head the whole thread. it's better than anything i've heard by greta van fleet, so that's good, and it makes me think of ghoulardi, which is also good.

Max Martin (whose roots are in rock) produced at least that one Bon Jovi hit.

why is there such a "difference" between this band aping Led Zep vs. the dozen or more popular bands that rip Black Sabbath? Or are there point-making reviews dissing Electric Wizard et al that I've just missed the threads about

Bands ripping Black Sabbath don't usually have major label bucks behind them and aren't touted as "Saviors Of (true) Rock-'n'-Roll" by Rolling Stone etc​.

It might come down to the vocals. Most bands that go the sludgy Sabbath route don't also ape Ozzy.

I'd say these guys show some promise. The singer is fun to watch and has good stage presence. They have some budding song-writing skills. The Plant-alike vocals are no doubt responsible for a lot of their notoriety, but I don't have too much of a problem with them. Probably as they develop they'll start sounding more like themselves and less like a Zep-clone.

would that be an improvement? time may tell. they'll prolly just end up sounding like Kings of Leon.

Maybe. The singer's look is a bit jam band to my eyes, so there's a real possibility they get worse.

Bands ripping Black Sabbath don't usually have major label bucks behind them and aren't touted as "Saviors Of (true) Rock-'n'-Roll" by Rolling Stone etc​.

This is clearly not what RS was saying in that 3-star review, though.

Electric Wizard don't sound like Sabbath though really. They exist on a continuum of course but they're unmistakably different things. If you'd told me that 'Highway Tune' was an In Through The Out Door outtake or demo I probably would have believed you.

John Paul Jones was asked on MTV around 1989 or so about Kingdom Come and other bands who claimed a Zep influence. He said that these bands' rhythm sections were all (in his words) "BOOM. BASH. BOOM. BASH." He stressed that he and Bonham were James Brown fanatics, and that that element was completely missed/missing from the new bands' approach.

These Led Zeppelin comparisons always make me wonder if the listener has ever really heard the band. In musical terms they have more in common with the Meters or Pentangle or Eddie Cochrane or whoever than any of these caterwauling+riffage! bands.

I've been thinking about this on and off since I was 12 or so. I think that basically the thing is that if/when you do get musicians who are both i) as eclectic and voracious in their interests as Zep and ii) at a comparable level of musical skill, they will probably also want to do something fairly original and not just recreate the sound of one of the most-played bands in rock history. A combination of electric blues/English folk/funk/Middle Eastern/noise improv influences is as likely as not to result in the resulting band being classified as something like "jazz" or "folk" or "avant" today. Afaict, Kingdom Come/Whitesnake/Bonham/Wolfmother/GVF aspire/d to the popularity of Zep and so essentially write/wrote pop songs tailored to the rock radio of their (less 'freeform' or 'progressive') day, based on a surface-level imitation of instantly recognizable elements of Zep's sound?

which can sometimes be OK!

One of my fav ilm posts

hard rock/metal is a multi-facted genre, and led zep successfully embodied almost every existing impulse; the guitar god, ersatz bloozmen, thudding knuckledraggers, stoner jamz, proggy wankfest showoffs, 4 on the floor bar rock, hippy dippy flower child folk, pseudo eastern psychobabble, I'm a double-cocked loverman baby, olde english stylee mythology, satanic mysticism. they're like the collective unconscious of rock.

I voted for sabbath.

-- Edward III, Friday, January 18, 2008 3:28 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

It’s funny you mention that because when I was a teenager I went through this phase where I said “If I really want to capture Zeppelin’s secret sauce I need to listen to what *they* listened to, and that got me into a bunch of folk and blues and R&B (to the extent I could discern the right things to listen to in the pre internet days,” and honestly that did make me both understand Zeppelin better and a better musician. But also the idea of using that to do nothing but recreate Zeppelin did come to seem very boring.

Tying to sound like Led Zeppelin, the biggest barrier is that those are some pretty singular musicians with pretty singular talents. As is often noted, lots of drummers try to mic their set like John Bonham, or play their set like John Bonham, or use the same equipment as John Bonham, or record in the same rooms as John Bonham. The only problem is they are not John Bonham. Which - not to veer into well trod territory - has always been one of my longtime defenses of accusations of plagiarism against Led Zeppelin. They might have ripped off a whole bunch of stuff, but they didn't sound like that stuff, not really, because of the players involved. In fact, hearing a lot of Zeppelin randomly on the radio for the last few days, I don't think Led Zeppelin really sounded like anybody at all. It's amazing how well those albums have aged, and how unique and singular they remain. Just that strange alchemy, that mix of all those disparate influences plus the particular players involved. Almost like a hard rock stroke of luck ala The Smiths.

I’m not even a Zep fan really, but once I played a set of Bonham vistalites in a Guitar Center and I remember feeling like “this is how drums are supposed to sound.” I kinda wanna buy some if I ever start playing again!

Good post, Josh. Yeah, my “defense” of Led Zep against plagiarism is along the same lines — let me know who they swiped the bridge of “Ten Years Gone” from, because I gotta hear those guys!

Also makes me wonder, though, if there been any truly great bands that aren’t equally as “singular” as Zep; or (to put it another way) which have been more successfully “imitated.”

Like, to take the example you mentioned, there have been bands which took elements of the Smiths’ sound, but did their own thing with it (e.g., the Sundays). Not a straight-up imitation.

Another (obvious) point is — you can’t “imitate” writing great songs.

Emil Amos (Holy Sons) recounts going into a Chapel Hill record store as a 12 year-old (and in the company of his mother) and nervously asking the clerk "Will there ever be a better band than Led Zeppelin?"

The clerk was Mac McCaughan, who gave it to him straight: "No."

I have not watched much in the way of early Zep live footage (so maybe it's an unfair comparison for a few years) but what strikes me about the costuming is how completely sexless the singer is - if you can't halfway mimic Robert Plant's cock outline, don't wear a vest with no shirt and leather pants.

NEW MUSIC

ON ILM

Xpost part of it is young Plant was just fuckin gorgeous too

if you can't halfway mimic Robert Plant's cock outline, don't wear a vest with no shirt and leather pants

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/SnappyAlertJohndory-small.gif

Like, to take the example you mentioned, there have been bands which took elements of the Smiths’ sound, but did their own thing with it (e.g., the Sundays). Not a straight-up imitation.

Reminds me of an interview I heard with Steve Earle once, where he made a distinction between bands that imitated the Beatles and those that were clearly influenced by the Beatles but found their own voice. (Never mind the fact that everyone is influenced by the Beatles). He brought up Neil Finn as an example of a Beatles-esque songwriter that nonetheless rarely sounds like a rip-off.

Anyway, per Zep, I think a good rare example is Jeff Buckley, whose "Grace" is clearly informed by Zeppelin (to his reported chagrin) but whose voice (in every sense) was distinct enough that his/its impact was separate. No doubt because he had similarly disparate, eclectic influences. Genesis and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Leonard Cohen, say, along with the aforementioned Smiths and Zeppelin.

Iirc, Chuck wrote in Stairway to Hell something to the effect that Zeppelin IV deserves credit for inspiring Sonic Youth and Prince as much as blame for Whitesnake and Kingdom Come?

The only problem is they are not John Bonham.

Don Henley complained to Glyn Johns about his drum mix on an early Eagles album, "Why can't you mix it so it sounds like John Bonham?" Glyn replied, "Because you are not John Bonham."

I seem to recall him proudly mic'ing the drums on the first Television album a la Bonham, and when he passed out after drinking too much the band re-mic'ed them the way they wanted them to sound.

Wait, that was Andy:

The first day in the studio came in November 1976. We had a 2pm start. Andy was nowhere in sight. Finally, about 4.30pm, he came traipsing in. He said, “I came in yesterday, to see what the place was like, and… I can’t work here!” He started listing all the technical tools these old studios didn’t have. We tried to calm him down. Finally, grudgingly, Andy said, “Well, I did manage to set the drums up last night. Got a good sound. Wanna hear it?”

He put on this tape he’d made. And, by God, from the speakers came this humongous, pumped-up John Bonham drum sound. Tom started freaking out. “No! No, no, no, no, no! We don’t want that! You need to take that apart!”

Andy was outraged. “Well, why did you hire me? That’s what I’m famous for. Fuck this! I’m getting a flight back!”

For the next few days, Andy would mutter, “Oh, right, so, this is some kind of New York thing. You want to sound bad like The Velvet Underground. You want to sound crap like The Stooges. I see…”