Foo Fighters
Foo Fighters
»
|
NATN Recommended
Foo Fighters
Foo Fighters
Roswell/Capitol, 1995
RiYL: Nevermind, Matthew Sweet, Angry Samoans, Keith Moon |
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.
PATRICK KASTNER | Affectionately known as Cousin Patty (yes, it's a "Throw Momma From The Train" reference), Patrick Kastner is a designer for the Columbus Post-Dispatch.