Back in 1988, the song “Get it On” from a mysterious new band called Kingdom Come hit radio and it sounded so much like Led Zeppelin, some folks were convinced Robert Plant and Jimmy Page had kissed and made up.
Alas, Kingdom Come turned out to be a bunch of Germans with bad perms. Once people realized how shameless they were in replicating Led Zeppelin’s sound, they quickly moved on. (I still vividly remember the audience booing them when they opened the Monsters of Rock tour that July at the Metrodome.)
So when Greta Van Fleet came straight out of Michigan in 2017 with an even more blatant attempt to rewrite “Physical Graffiti,” I figured they’d enjoy a similar career path to the dumpster. Instead, the band of three brothers and their buddy on drums have not only been accepted, they’re actually popular. They drew about 13,000 surprisingly youthful fans to St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center Sunday night.
Yes, vocalist Josh Kiszka has expanded a bit beyond his Plant impression (he now also rips off AC/DC’s Brian Johnson), guitarist Jake Kiszka apparently can’t not play like Page, who he admits he studied closely for an entire year. And while one might think that three albums in Greta Van Fleet would have moved on from the Zepp, but the first two tracks from their latest record “Starcatcher” (“Meeting the Master” and “Waited All Your Life”) sounded even more derivative hearing them live.
Beyond the actual sound, GVF also steals the whole faux mysticism thing from Plant and company, stuffing songs like “Lover, Leaver (Taker, Believer)” with lyrics about the Witch of Endor, falling castles, thunder underground and Satan playing the flute. They dress like a glitchy AI asked to create a ’70s rock band that exclusively tours Middle-earth. Their two-hour show Sunday night included belching pyro and waves of smoke, extremely lengthy guitar and drum solos and the invitation from Josh Kiszka to “smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.”
Speaking of Josh, he’s going to wreck his voice if he keeps singing like he does. He’s got a huge, odd-sounding but powerful voice that he often brings to a growling shriek. On top of that, his vocals were often buried in the mix, making it difficult to make out any of his lyrics, ridiculous as they may be.
To be sure, the kids in the crowd loved them, perhaps because there’s really no one else doing this stuff these days. Personally, I kept (and keep) waiting for them to break character and admit this was all one long elaborate hoax.
