Foo Fighters
Foo Fighters
Roswell/Capitol,
1995
Reviewed by
Patrick Kastner
Almost five years after the would-be anthems, the Courtney references and the
tight pop hooks, the first thing that comes to mind about the Foo Fighters' self-titled
debut is that kick-ass drum fill in between "This Is A Call" and "I'll
Stick Around."
Just as "This Is A Call" is finally winding down a bit long-windedly, and your
attention is threatening to wane, Foo frontman Dave Grohl seizes you with a rapid-fire
pounding of his snare that announces "I'll Stick Around" has arrived.
And then it's clear: Oh yeah, this is Dave Grohl we're talking about. Only the
greatest drummer in rock and roll since Keith Moon. You know, the one with metronome
timing. The one who could pound his kit like a 400 lb. gorilla. The one who was so damn
good, he helped change the dynamics of a power trio.
Don't know what I'm talking about? Listen to some tapes of Nirvana playing live sometime.
Kurt Cobain's guitar is so distorted that Krist Novoselic had to play melody on his bass.
That left Grohl to hold down the rhythm all by himself. He was so fast and so precise, his
drums could do the part of the drums and the bass.
Why am I telling you this? Because Foo Fighters is a drummers' album. Grohl uses drums as
a lead instrument. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the songs on the album were written
on his kit. The drums always set the tone and the rest of the instruments are chasing,
trying to keep up.
Percussion is everything. Listen to the album imagining everything from the lyrics to the
guitars as drums. Everything comes in machine-gun bursts. On "Watershed," the
guitars and vocals actually provide the song's rhythm, while Grohl uses the drums off the
beat almost entirely for fills. Songs such as "Big Me" and "For All The
Cows" are "ballads," but they go by in the blink of an eye, they are so
propulsive.
Much of this is probably because Grohl played all the instruments on Foo Fighters
himself, starting by laying down drum tracks and then building guitars, bass and vocals on
top.
The songwriting on Foo Fighters was lauded back in 1995 because it was so
surprising. This was the drummer we were talking about. Most of the time, drummers were
crazy, drug-addled Neanderthals (that gets back to Moon and his soulmate, John Bonham),
not smart guys who could front a band. Which only makes Nirvana all the more amazing. The
guy who did this entire album by himself was the third-best songwriter in the band.
Upon further review, Foo Fighters is sort of like the Sour Patch Kids to
Nirvana's spice drops. The songs, while tight and hook-filled, strike me as harmless, a
bit like a Matthew Sweet album. "This Is A Call" and "Alone + Easy
Target" would have fit right along with the anthems on Nevermind. Only the
last song on the album, "Exhausted," adds anything new to alternative rock's
songwriting pantheon.
The lyrics are almost unintelligible in that fine Nirvana tradition. Grohl was wisely
trying to hide the Kurt references from rock critics with too much time on their hands.
And he wasn't too confident in his voice, which is a bit thin. Looking back, some of the
songs do have some obvious references to the tumult going on around Grohl while he was
writing them. ("How could it be / I'm the only one who sees / your rehearsed
insanity?" he sings on "I'll Stick Around." Gee, that's not about Courtney,
is it?) But I'll leave most of the hypothesizing to sleazier minds than mine.
If you want to enjoy Foo Fighters' debut, enjoy it for being the signature work from one
of rock and roll's greatest musicians. And disregard all that other crap. All it takes is
one drum roll to forget it.
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