Album review: Foo Fighters – Foo Fighters

The debut album for what would become a mainstay for decades in American rock, the Foo Fighters were born as a solo project made in grief.

It’s hard to imagine any musician had a more tumultuous first half of the 1990’s than Dave Grohl.

Beginning the decade as a drummer for D.C. area-based punk rock outfit Scream, Grohl was left as a free agent after the group abruptly disbanded following the mid-tour departure of their bassist. He soon thereafter connected with Buzz Osborne, the guitarist for The Melvins whom Grohl met and befriended on tour, and was informed that Nirvana, who had released their debut album Bleach just a year earlier, were in need of a drummer.

Grohl joined Nirvana during the recording of their legendary 1991 album Nevermind, an unexpected commercial smash hit that elevated Nirvana and grunge to the forefront of the music world in the early 1990’s. After releasing one more studio album with In Utero in 1993, the group disbanded after lead singer and blossoming cultural icon Kurt Cobain was found dead of suicide in his Seattle apartment.

Cobain’s sudden death at the age of 27 left both Grohl and American music as a whole at an inflection point. While the Cool Britannia-inspired Britpop sound quickly picked up legions of fans across much of the rest of the world, Americans were drawn into grunge more than any other subset of rock prior to Cobain’s death.

Dave Grohl wrote songs, but never really saw himself as a songwriter while a member of Nirvana. Cobain was hailed as a great songwriter during his lifetime, a reputation that has only sweetened in the decades since his death – therefore Grohl wasn’t exactly eager to share songs he had written with the band’s frontman.

Though Cobain expressed his emphatic approval of Alone + Easy Target and encouraged Grohl to write songs for the band, he resisted the idea, leading to nothing more than jam sessions and demos of songs that ended up on Foo Fighters.

With initially no vision for a multi-platinum selling band with a worldwide fanbase in the coming decades, the Foo Fighters started as almost a compilation-style project of tracks Grohl had written throughout his years in Nirvana and the months following Cobain’s death.

Though he initially contemplated abandoning his music career entirely, Grohl went on to book a week of studio time at Robert Lang Studios in Seattle, recording all of the vocals and instruments for the record within that week.

Because the album is in many ways a compilation, it never really develops into a cohesive listening experience – but that’s not to say that Grohl’s emotion, uncertainty over recording alone and creativity aren’t on full display throughout the record.

With the quick assembly of many of the tracks, there is plenty of lyrical nonsense to be found on the album – Grohl admitted to as much in retrospect of the record – yet much of it still feels emotionally resonant.

Grohl’s abilities with seemingly nonsense lyrics are best exemplified on This Is a Call and For All the Cows, the former a nostalgic-sounding track with a booming chorus that serves as a thank you to those who played a role in his life. The latter showcases Grohl’s sense of humor, comparing himself to a cow while talking about how he’s perceived in the public eye.

The album isn’t all lyrical nonsense, as that would be selling some of the most potent moments of the record well short – I’ll Stick Around is a hard rock-turned-post-grunge banger chronicling feelings of being used and violated – which Grohl later admitted was indeed referring to Courtney Love, Cobain’s widow.

Though written during the Nirvana days, Grohl clearly took a page out of the Cobain songwriting playbook with Alone + Easy Target and Exhausted, with the former perhaps being the album’s grungiest track and its greatest highlight, turning from an almost Noel Gallagher-like guitar opening into a song that feels like it could have fit on Nevermind, with it hard to not imagine Cobain’s vocals on the track.

The record gets off to a remarkably strong start – after the optimistic-sounding This Is a Call and angsty I’ll Stick Around, listeners are treated to the album’s biggest hit single in Big Me, a short jangle pop ballad that offers a softer side of Grohl while invoking Eight Days a Week-era Beatles.

After Alone + Easy Target, the album’s fourth track, the compilation-feel of the record begins to become apparent as listeners are sent through a few moments of musical whiplash. There’s the fast-paced, ambiguous but sorrow-stricken Good Grief, immediately followed by the atmospheric and spacey Floaty, with guitar riffs that sound ripped off of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.

While Grohl would go on to later have a much more polished and refined hard rock/metal sound that was brilliantly showcased on the Foo Fighters’ 2011 album Wasting Light, the metal and noise rock attempts on this record mostly fall flat, with Weenie Beenie and Wattershed coming across as more forgettable tunes that break up the album’s already frenetic pacing.

Although Oh, George is perhaps the album’s most forgettable track, with nonsense lyrics and an instrumental indistinguishable from much of the rock of its era, the album turns around once again towards the end.

After the comedic relief and relative mood boost of For All the Cows, Grohl showcases perhaps his greatest moment of creativity on the record with X-Static, a distinctly post-punk flavored track with soft, low vocals throughout while featuring the lone guest musician on the album – Greg Dulli of The Afghan Whigs.

The album receives a fitting closer in Exhausted, a track emanating the energy of the title with low, melancholy vocals and a mix of X-Static‘s post-punk influence and the darker songs on In Utero, tying together Grohl’s whirlwind of emotions at the time of the album’s recording.

While it’s remarkable to see what the Foo Fighters have become in the last three decades from a commercial standpoint, it’s perhaps more remarkable to look back on how it started – a cathartic solo recording experience of a musician in anonymity who had just been deeply impacted by tragedy and grief.

This album is clearly not perfect – but it also clearly displays the remarkable musicianship, creativity and talent Grohl is capable of, something the music world would be well-acquainted with in the coming years.

The record also undoubtedly helped kick off another wave of mainstream American rock in post-grunge, highlighted by powerful vocals and dominating power chords that still remained radio-friendly.

Although not without its duds and low points, the Foo Fighters’ self-titled debut remains an album worth revisiting, packed with several very strong tracks that helped mark a turning point in 1990’s rock music.

FOO FIGHTERS/FOO FIGHTERS/JUNE 26, 1995/ROSWELL RECORDS/CAPITOL RECORDS

ALTERNATIVE ROCK/HARD ROCK/POST-GRUNGE/GRUNGE/NOISE ROCK

TRACK LISTING

1. This Is a Call
2. I’ll Stick Around
3. Big Me
4. Alone + Easy Target
5. Good Grief
6. Floaty
7. Weenie Beenie
8. Oh, George
9. For All the Cows
10. X-Static
11. Wattershed
12. Exhausted

FAVORITE TRACKS: THIS IS A CALL, I’LL STICK AROUND, BIG ME, ALONE + EASY TARGET, FOR ALL THE COWS, X-STATIC, EXHAUSTED

LEAST FAVORITE TRACKS: WEENIE BEENIE; OH, GEORGE

75/100