Greta Van Fleet — Anthem of a Peaceful Army ANALYSIS & REVIEW
Published 10/26/2018
As the music world over the last century has shifted its stance on plagiarism from being flattery to being illegal, thanks to enhanced intellectual property laws, here’s a debut album from a band that shows how wearing your influences on your sleeve for all to see is not necessarily the same crime. In fact, it shouldn’t be a crime at all. I think most music lovers should agree that the final product of a work is more important than the starting idea, unless of course your listening mostly consists of Xenakis, Cage, or other process-obsessed musicians. Greta Van Fleet have a starting point that they don’t try to hide, being that of the language and sonic soul of past rock n’ roll greats. Learning from the past greats is obviously nothing new throughout the history of music, and while this music certainly doesn’t reach the same levels of purity, consistency, or enjoyment as its role models, this group’s applied study of general songwriting concepts from the best of a previous generation set themselves up well to create a solid piece of music. Speaking in this day and age, it creates a piece of music I’d take over many other modern works that ignore the past.
Greta Van Fleet did rather well at pulling the right things off the shelves of past successes to form the musical structure. Perhaps they pulled a little too much than they could have handled or recreated, notably in big-picture timbral areas that simply require more instrumental talent. However, they also pulled some very important and specific techniques in how to get the most juice out of a three-chord structure, how to construct a form that comes across as free flowing, and how to find interesting linear motion within simplicity of color and harmonic language. The latter was their most crucial and substantial success. Again, it was far from the consistency and charm people may have heard 40 years ago from bands who operated with similar tactics, however there were a few outliers here that really sold this work as being one that deserves some praise.
Melody was a real strength, as there was seemingly always a line that had its own personality and purpose bringing the listener through the otherwise minimally decorated structures. The best melodies relied heavily on stepwise scalar motion, which proved to be a great way to sound congenial and directional while providing a quicker balance to the slow harmonic rhythms and creating natural moments of tension and release. Some didn’t come to be incredibly uplifting or noteworthy, like the chorus in “Watching Over” which only jumped around the minor tonic and stayed away from giving much juicy dissonance. Then, some were absolutely beautiful, like the song “The New Day” which used a wonderful scalar fall to scale degree Sol in the I V IV V pattern that infused brilliant life into the easygoing acoustic texture.
Although overall tempo and pacing within a progression could have been a bit more varied and unexpected to find a greater carefree atmosphere, overall rhythm as the ornament on the simple ideas was delightful and what really made the simplicity shine. Never was there a drag in pounding a downbeat too much or a bore in rhythmic motives. Even things as simple as the agogic accent on beat 2 in the guitar gave enough energy and feeling to continue the phrase. Guitar riff patterns were perhaps the most underrated triumph, as they weren’t anything unheard of yet were super exposed and could have easily flattened the experience had they not had a succinct pattern that went beyond the metric accents. The mixing of denser rhythm in singular layers such as vocals and slower rhythm in background layers of bass and guitar allowed for the texture to stay exciting and able to develop. This was the means to which the music found vivacity through using three or four simple chords. The accessibility through having simple colors mixed with the energy found from broad and distinct rhythm is where this album gave an enjoyable experience.
One persistent negative was that the lead vocals were constantly jumping to new places within its register having no discernable musical reason for doing so. It’s as if the vocals were on a different timer than the rest of band on when to grow in dynamic or energy. However, vocal quality was rather strong, and the wide vocal range was indeed a big factor in the music having direction and personality. I won’t necessarily call it unique, but it fit the musical intentions well. I felt as through the instrumentation could’ve used a bit of expansion, for two reasons: one, the instrumentalists weren’t mind-blowingly talented enough on their parts to add any significant support with their own hands, and two, the music did get a bit stale when always giving way to the guitar to lead transition points or form development.
There was a bit of a lack of talent, especially considering their influences, in adding appropriate and rich sounds to flesh out the atmosphere. I felt that most in the opening track, “Age of Man”, which fell into sounding like a radio-friendly modern hack job in trying to find bona fide power with nothing but slow power chords. To me, that’s a typical problem that the 1980’s had in transitioning from the previous decade, and this group fell into that mix as well. More often than not, the guitarist can’t provide everything. It must be said, though, that many bands today struggle with much more and much worse. At a ground level, this album at least sounded exciting, and on top of that, sonically accessible.
The toughest part about this review is my final word and recommendation. Obviously, I enjoyed a lot of the musical substance and thought it was a well-done album. The problem is, literally every strength I found on this album is about exactly that x2 on any given 1970’s rock album. The immense derivative nature of this work had its place like I discussed, but comes back as a bit of negative when discussing the album’s overall worthiness. I will say that the songs “Lover, Leaver” and “The New Day” are two wonderful tracks that carry the album and provide a great example on how learning from the greats can pay dividends in a new generation. As you should know, I review the music itself and nothing more, so with that I say that this is surely some good music that deserves recognition and is one of the better albums of year in my opinion. It’s tough to whole-heartedly recommend, though, because these exact styles and techniques were done with godly perfection about 40–50 years ago, and that’s some of the best music ever made. Do what you will.
