Greta Van Fleet
Starcatcher

I would say that, with this fourth album of 2023, the period of credit regarding the high expectations towards Greta Van Fleet can be considered over. Unfortunately, with an almost definitive downsizing of their actual weight and importance in the framework of classic hard rock and rock blues.

Mind you, these guys have great skills, they play well… I particularly like how the guitarist works: he has a genuinely late sixties old-school touch, unleashes his rock blues exactly as if he had seventy years under his belt, rather than twenty-five at the time. His primordial, warm, and pointed sound is a pleasure to listen to, and it’s easy to overlook the fact that all his licks come from virtually one major master, that one, the one with the Chinese grandmother, the guy who turned the Yardbirds into Led Zeppelin, back in 1968.

As for the singer twin… what to say about him…: nothing new, he screams with commendable ease and power on even absurdly high notes, characterizing but also making the listening of Greta a bit cloying. Brilliant players are also the other two musicians, handling drums, basses, and organs inspired moreover by the same dirigible source as their companions (which is the best source possible and imaginable, in the field).

Everything goes quite well, everything would go better if the songs, the songwriting, the compositions, the scores, that thing there which ultimately remains the most important in a musical offering, adequately supported the perfect vintage scaffolding of the sound and performances. Instead, it's not like the riffs, the chord changes, the singing melodies, the instrumental inventions are so memorable and essential… It's pleasantly retro rock blues, from those glorious times when it was in full growth, healthy and strong, irresistible; but reaching the last track of the album one does so with some difficulty, without having caught along the way epic, unmissable, thrilling moments capable of supporting the desire to listen again and create strong emotions.

Maybe what’s missing in this album, as in the previous ones, are just a couple of masterpiece tracks, those capable of carrying an entire album, of making the rest, even the inevitable fillers, perceived with different ears. Instead, here we face an aurea mediocritas, the worst for a young (but not so much anymore, by now: two of the three Kiszka brothers are approaching thirty) and rampant hard rock band that has reached the fourth chapter.

Perhaps there is still hope, and the "almost" mentioned in the judgment at the beginning of the review is my personal wish. The history of rock also accounts for musical realities that managed to find their main road only in the fifth or sixth work… who knows.