Greta Van Fleet - Starcatcher


I'm glad i document this stuff because otherwise i wouldn't be able to say way back on May 15 of 2021 i hoped Greta Van Fleet would get to make a 3rd album. Here it is a little over 2 years later and i picked up Starcatcher on my after work grocery run. Critics are going to tell me it sounds like a garage full of Led Zeppelin demos they never bothered to properly produce, and that it somehow fails to live up to whatever expectations they invented that morning, so we just won't even bother to go there. Instead we'll take the liberty of assuming it will sound like Greta Van Fleet and hear what their brains told their fingers to play this time around. 

Holy hell, my friends, that is a seriously glorious Side A. If you want to compare this to Led Zeppelin then i have no choice but to say it puts Led Zeppelin to shame. I'm not actually a nostalgic guy, and none of this is a competition. Absolutely, this is straightforwardly unapologetic 70s Blues Rock here in the now of 2023, because that's what Greta Van Fleet does, and they do it well. It's so over the top ridonculous i truly don't know how you can't be smiling so hard your head falls off. Remember those Melanie photos where i said she looks like she wandered off from the tour and now she lives in the desert? Yeah, you pull out the monsterous photo book to see a sword in a sand dune, and i can't not see the Kiszka bothers gleefully reenacting the desert scene from Spaceballs where they follow the Dink Dinks to meet Yogurt, just plain Yogurt. And then Josh proceeds to curdle the chrome components of your neighbor's 10 year old '67 Chevy Corvair. 

Now, as far as the concept goes, it's really just your standard life is a magic adventure through space and time kind of thing, but it's also kind of a "watch us do a completely insane thing humans can't actually do, hows about we catch a star like in a Brian Bilston poem" kind of thing. I'll go there, this is transcendent. 

I don't need to keep write-yammering through the second half, i know it will be equally wonderful. Instead, we'll just leave it at 3 for 3 in terms of Greta Van Fleet albums. This is so flamboyantly ludicrous you can't even pretend they don't mean 120% of every single second of it. Now shush, Side B is starting and i don't have the time or energy for any more real-world nonsense. Probably gonna flip it back over 3 or 5 more times before slogging off to bed, so go ahead and amuse yourselves for the rest of the evening. 

On that score, if you're looking for something to do, maybe check out Starcatcher, the new album by Greta Van Fleet. I hear it's fantastic with my own ears.

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