There was a lot to like about last night’s show. Greta Van Fleet—the band that answer the question “What if Led Zeppelin were just that little bit more camp?”—played a short but exceptionally well-received set at Auckland’s Spark Arena.
Roughly broken into four mini-sets, the breaks to allow singer Josh Kiszka time for costume changes, the show opened strongly with The Falling Sky, from their current Starcatcher album, and got substantially stronger as The Falling Sky gave way to Safari Song, an excellent song, Greta Van Fleet’s clear and undeniable Led Zeppelin influences never more apparent. But this is where things started to look a tiny bit dodgy.
Singer Josh, in the studio, sounds so much like Robert Plant that it’s hardly surprising that Plant has said that “they are Led Zeppelin I.” On stage, however—at least last night—Kiszka’s voice simply wasn’t quite up to the task, or to the high notes he reaches so effortlessly in the studio. Maybe the band are tired from performing—they’ve been touring Starcatcher pretty much continuously for the last couple of months—but Josh’s voice simply wasn’t quite where it needed to be, sounding, when he reached for the crescendos that soar and tower on record, just a little strangled.
Fortunately, he had his twin brother Jake on guitar to make up for his occasional shortcomings. Jake has, famously, studied Jimmy Page’s guitar playing in great depth—yes, the Led Zeppelin references keep coming, but that’s inevitable with this band—and his playing is powerful, overstated, and exactly what the show needed.
What the show didn’t need, however, was the extended solos that are increasingly de rigeur at rock shows. Highway Tune is a belter of a song, an absolute stomp that doesn’t need an extended jam that just felt out of place and self-indulgent. The quick revisit of Highway Tune at the end of Runway Blues was a lovely touch, mind, a nice breaking-up of the setlist that adds a little interest. The drum solo that followed, however, undermined much of the good work that had preceded it. Daniel Wagner is, undeniably, an exceptional drummer, and in the contexts of tightly-crafted songs that give his playing direction and focus, he knows just what to do and does it very, very well. But give the man five minutes alone behind a kit and you realise that, like most drummers—there’s rare exceptions; Mick Fleetwood is one of the few that comes to mind— he needs the constraints of a song. Drum solos had their moment in the sun back in the dinosaur days of the 1970s; that moment has long gone.
And so the show continued. Josh Kiszka—one of three brothers on stage, along with Jake on guitar and Sam on bass—is suprisingly hard to pin down as a singer and frontman. Dressed in a perhaps ill-advised white jumpsuit and jacket, he seemed unsure of exactly what persona he wanted to project for this show. The music, and his vocal style in particular, scream “rock god,” but he was giving something closer to Vegas-era Elvis meets Freddie Mercury, a china doll with a questionable haircut. I hate to have to admit it, but it failed to engage me. When they have the songs—anything from From The Fires, their first EP, would do me quite nicely for starters—they’re strong, they’re engaging, they have the music. But a rock stands and falls, in the end, on the songs, and the second half of the set—a mere 14 songs, and that’s including the drum solo—dragged just a little bit.
But what would I know? I was there to review; I wasn’t there with the passion that I saw displayed by the fans at the barrier behind the photo pit. Greta Van Fleet are clearly a lot of people’s very favourite band, and for those true believers, this was a very, very well-received show. I’m glad they enjoyed their evening as much as they did; I wish I’d enjoyed it quite so much.
