Pitchfork gave Greta Van Fleet a 1.6. The decimal point is doing more work than the band.
The Original Review
“Greta Van Fleet sound like they did weed exactly once, called the cops, and tried to record a Led Zeppelin album before they arrested themselves.”
The math: 1.6 out of 10. Not 1.5. Not 1.7. A score so specific it suggests Jeremy D. Larson sat with a calculator and tried to find the exact numerical value of 'I personally cannot stand that this band exists.' 1.6 implies precision. 1.6 implies 1.5 would have been too kind and 1.7 too generous. The decimal point here is doing more emotional labor than the four members of Greta Van Fleet combined.
Now run the actual numbers. Anthem of the Peaceful Army debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200, moved 80,000 units in its first week, and won the Grammy for Best Rock Album the following year. User aggregate scores sit comfortably above 7. Pitchfork's number is 6+ points below the audience and 8+ points below the Recording Academy. When your review and reality differ by a full decade of music history, the variable isn't the album.
The thesis, all 1,200 words of it, reduces to: 'they sound like Led Zeppelin.' That's the indictment. By that standard every Pitchfork-anointed band of the 2000s should also score 1.6 for sounding like Television, the Velvet Underground, or a Wire B-side. Pitchfork gave The Strokes' debut a 9.1 for sounding exactly like Television. Greta Van Fleet score 1.6 for sounding exactly like Zeppelin. The math implies derivative-ness is genre-specific, and the genre is 'music critics already like.'
A 1.6/10 places Anthem of the Peaceful Army in the bottom percentile of all recorded audio — below novelty Christmas singles, below Crazy Frog, below the sound of someone falling down a flight of carpeted stairs. That is not a score. That is a number cosplaying as a score. The 1.6 isn't measuring the record. It's measuring how much fun the critic had typing the takedown. The decimal isn't precision. It's a smirk. The math ain't mathing.
