Greta Van Fleet at Bridgestone Arena — Yes, They Can Play

Josh Kiszka's voice held the whole room, Jake's guitar howled, and a long-awaited return to Nashville landed hard.

Greta Van Fleet has spent five years in a weird purgatory — too famous for the clubs, too young to have earned the arena they were given, and too obviously in love with 1973 to be left alone about it. The Starcatcher tour is the record where they stopped apologizing for it, and the Nashville show was the night they proved they can carry the room that came with it. Josh Kiszka's voice held the whole Bridgestone; Jake's guitar howled; the rhythm section has graduated from 'competent' to 'genuinely good.'

The highlights were the new ones — 'Starcatcher,' 'The Falling Sky,' the acoustic 'Tears of Rain' — where they leaned into the acoustic and the orchestral rather than the riff. The Zeppelin-isms are still there; they're just one ingredient now, not the whole meal. The faithful got 'Highway Tune' as an encore and sang it louder than the band. They are never going to escape the comparison. They don't need to. They've finally become a band worth seeing on their own terms.