Rock music! What could possibly go wrong?
[Video]
[2.75]
Alfred Soto: Oh, so this is what they sound like! They sound like nothing at all, or, rather, everything: Kings of Leon refracting Skynyrd refracting Neil Young, with a vocal that imitates Bugs Bunny imitating a court fool. To dismiss “You’re the One” is to give undue attention to the piano bar house band that gets twenty minutes to perform their original — I use the term loosely — material. We Tango in the Night fans had our moment; let Greta Van Fleet exhume Carter-era beasts if they like.
[3]
Vikram Joseph: I’ll admit I was expecting a singer-songwriter; instead, here’s an earnest, breathtakingly unsubtle stadium-rock anachronism, bathed in Lynyrd Skynyrd guitars and honky-tonk piano, notable only for some strangely cartoonish vocals and a remarkable commitment to regressiveness.
[2]
Ian Mathers: In their brief but already dramatically successful effort in emphasizing the very worst bits of Led Zeppelin smushed up with a million buttrock bands, you have to admit this about “You’re the One”: they’ve maybe never quite so effectively compressed what’s odious about them than in the couplet, “Babe, you’re so young and pretty/but you’re evil, you oughta know.” Fuck off outta here.
[1]
Thomas Inskeep: They’re not even good enough to be a Led Zep ripoff, they’re just a generic early ’70s semi-hard rock ripoff, a bar band who inexplicably got signed and promoted. This is a glass of tepid water that’s been sitting out all day, and might even have a little dust on it. Who wants to drink that?
[1]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Approaches tolerability in the most boring ways until about one minute and forty-five seconds in, which is when Josh Kiszka stumbles through a second verse of “Babe, you’re so young and pretty/But you’re evil, you oughta know/Darling, ain’t that a pity/Won’t you stand yourself and show.” These four lines take “You’re the One” from mediocre to awful — they’re cliche, nonsensical, misogynistic, and contrived all at once, achieving some sort of land speed record in bad writing.
[1]
Ryo Miyauchi: Greta Van Fleet’s rhyme schemes are crudely elementary, and their imagination is pathetically shallow; they put nothing down on paper so they compensate by shrieking, drum fills and organ solos on record to suggest passion, or something. Their reference points committed similar crimes too, but this is just uninspired cosplay.
[4]
Alex Clifton: If you didn’t tell me who this was by, I would’ve guessed some sixties act. It has all the hallmarks needed to signify that: organ, choir-y chorus, yelping at inappropriate moments, etc. I’m so close to liking this, but there’s something that holds me back from giving myself over whole-heartedly to this song. I love vintage tracks, so why is this so hard? I think the answer lies in Greta Van Fleet’s apeing of sixties rock. They’re trying so hard to be Dylan, Zepplin, and Baez wrapped up in one neat unit that I get no sense of who Greta Van Fleet is supposed to be. They sound like a mishmash cover band that’s throwing everything into a blender with the hopes that something will stick, but it ends up coming out bland. Had there been more oomph to it — less wailing, more feeling, just something to make it a little different — I’d be all over this; as it stands, I can’t commit.
[4]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: The thing about paying homage is that you can spend so much time emulating a specific sound that, in the process, you forget that music is so much more than the literal sounds themselves. Yes, Greta Van Fleet sound like Led Zeppelin and The Allman Brothers Band and whoever else, but their music lacks virtually everything that made their forebears’ best work worthwhile: the evocative lyricism, the emotional candor, the sharp songwriting. Greta Van Fleet are nothing more than a ragtag group of musicians whose shelf-life would’ve been limited to a spattering of gigs at local bars, but received fame because some people are shamelessly desperate for familiar rock music that’ll save them from the current state of pop radio. Don’t blame the band, blame the fans.
[5]
Will Rivitz: Look, being the contrarian I am, I always desperately want to spite the music-criterati by enjoying young bands who succeed despite increasingly ineffectual online panning; there’s little that inspires such schadenfreude as a self-righteous and mostly humorless collection of reviews that ends up inspiring both precisely the opposite of the intended effect and a non-response from the band succinctly detailing just how little of a shit they give about negative press in one brilliantly condescending paragraph. Here, though, it’s unstoppable force meets immovable object, where the force is the aforementioned petty streak and the object is fetishizing the rock ‘n’ roll’s absolute nadir. If the object can accurately be described as “troubadourian,” the object wins.
[2]
Katherine St Asaph: I mean, it’s bad, and unexpectedly bad at that (as usual, the vocals ruin it all; imagine Nate Ruess with sudden torticollis, squeaking out the word “pretty”). But the only difference between Greta Fleet exhuming dated and gross Led Zep songs and your critical darlings exhuming dated and gross Steely Dan songs is who’s currently mansplaining to you.
[3]
Edward Okulicz: Until the point that the vocals come in, this comes across as a passable and quite melodic guitar rock track, albeit one stuck in a straitjacket by its era fixation/fetishisation. When the vocals come in, I hear a bored, work-a-day bar band. Then the second verse has a bit of attempt at some raw emotion and I hear a singer who just isn’t very good at emoting, or lifting the level of power and tension in a song but is trying hard and failing to do so. On top of an uninspired but competent band, that’s not getting me to wave my lighter. But in truth, I’ve heard plenty of critically acclaimed classic rock songs that put my teeth on edge far more than this. Led Zeppelin were boring, how about some Def Leppard clones instead?
[5]
Tim de Reuse: So clean, so lavish, so expensive-sounding, so competent, so well-executed, so polished, so sensible. Designed to be fundamentally un-hateable to anyone who existed in the United States at any point in time between 1970 and 2019. I will not listen to this again, and it will pass effortlessly through the sieve of my memory like the empty-calorie un-statement that it is.
[2]