Review Summary: The ambition of the '70s boiled down to the comfort of modern day nostalgia.
Why is something mediocre？ To be briefly self-referential, when it comes to the album review there is a difference between listening experiences in context and in a vacuum, and to balance these different experiences is to successfully relay why one might like an album the other would not. In this sense,
From the Fires only appeals to the vacuum, while taking advantage of the context at the same time it wants to ignore it. While touting themselves as the band determined to bring rock back, as if it had ever left, in reality Greta Van Fleet are dooming themselves to predetermined irrelevancy by recycling decades-old tricks.
In a vacuum, the musicianship displayed on
From the Fires is of a high school rock band who just figured out how to write a song with three chords; apt since the band members themselves are barely of legal drinking age. Songs like "Meet on the Ledge", while sounding like an attempt to sound big foiled by dampened mixing, echo the promise of an ambitious group looking to impress. The songwriting isn't top-notch - the riffs get repetitive shortly - and the vocals sound a bit thin and timid in places, but it is a very optimistic sound that could be charming to the unassuming listener.
In context,
From the Fires is Kingdom Come, Wolfmother, Andrew Stockdale and the ilk manifesting themselves once again in Greta Van Fleet. With the clear intention of sounding like it's directly coming from your dad's boombox, derivative and reductive riffs like "Safari Song" and "Highway Tune" pound away attempting to convince you guitar music is back. The skeptical thought of course being, if this is the kind of music to make rock 'n' roll relevant again, it seems like a kind of good thing for it to have been put to rest.
The old adage of a following artist being a parody of a preceding artist will possibly never find a better application than
From the Fires. There is indeed a reason why Robert Plant and company went on to produce different music, to avoid becoming a parody of themselves and letting acts like Greta Van Fleet become the joke. The element of freshness persists in the music of a band like Led Zeppelin, because of their out-of-place sound for the time, the songwriting was abrasive because it had to be. While music has already heard many similar sounds since, during their time Led Zeppelin were called 'a bunch of screaming monkeys', and by the time Greta Van Fleet sashayed on to the scene people were already nostalgic for the aping.
The law of value theorizes that the easier it is to make, the less valuable it becomes, and it is perhaps at its full effect on
From the Fires. The record is akin to a '70s album rip that's been torrented so many times it has lost its original production quality, the fact that Greta Van Fleet started out as a Led Zeppelin cover band almost invalidating any need for a review. When your mind has already been made up accordingly, because it's a sound you've heard literally half a century ago done bigger and better, that is when something becomes mediocre.
