The Foo Fighters - Classic or Dud?

also as far as one off foos tribute acts go is "noo fighters" taken

"faux fighters" was right there

"nirvano"

somehow the main thing that's come of this revive for me is that i have "Fraternity" stuck in my head. i don't even know what it was a B-side to - a friend put it on a mixtape for me in my freshman year of college. kind of a dumb one-idea song but that one idea is annoyingly headsticky.

also i remember my roommate hearing the lyrics as a tedious boast "I'm in a big fraternity, I'm in the Beef Fraternity-y-y"

i agree w Brad re Wasting Light, it’s such a great album

everything after it sounds homogenous/generic, new album is ~fine~ but boring

it’s a shame bc they seem in general to be v funloving & enthusiastic music nerds, but i think they lost their looseness & sense of fun in the grind of putting out new material

like they take themselves too seriously & deadens the music somehow idk

listening to TINLTL right now for the first time in eons. it's closer to TCATS than i remembered which is a good thing, and less exhaustingly compressed than it sounds in my memory.

"Headwires" even feels almost like an attempt at another "Everlong," with the "better than a bullet being fired" part sounding a great deal like "If everything could ever feel this real forever." I like the watery opening riff, always reminded me of 16-bit video game music for some reason.

... wow the foo fighters s/t really slaps from front to back. i used to think it was a little undeveloped compared to the follow-ups but nope! wrong!

“exhausted” is like an alt universe catherine wheel song

ooh! the debut sounds amazing in my memory but I've been a bit afraid to return in case I'm wrong

I remember having the tape with me during a field trip in 3rd or 4th grade, and my friend being amused by the title "For All the Cows" and making up a sorta Monty Python-esque version of what it might sound like (first Python fan in my life).

if anything it sounds more amazing now, though my love for idiosyncratic rock records that unite several substrains of punk and alt rock (“floaty” is a GREAT emo song) and sometimes subvert their hooks in hilarious endearing ways cf. “good grief”

... is maybe peaking atm

For fans of the first one, this is also worth a listen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzTGRxUlyV8

X-Static is my favorite Foo song

my TINLTL listen kinda petered out - dug "Headwires" but otherwise it's not so much my jam after track 7. i remembered a high school friend really really connecting with "M.I.A." but it never landed for me. maybe at 17 i had just reached the end of my finding dave's shouty rawk voice cool, and if it had come out a little earlier i would have thought it was the rock album of the year, idk. still my plan now is to revisit the debut tonight and probably tomorrow take my first dip into their later albums with Wasting Light!

actually first up though speaking of the X-Files i owe myself a spin of their "Down in the Park"

their best b-sides are "How I Miss You" and "Winnebago"

god i LOVE how fuzzy the first album is. "i'll stick around" and "alone + easy target" have sounded especially amazing to my ears. it's interesting, coming back to this after the two subsequent albums, i "hear" the power-poppiness of the tracks more - like "good grief" ruuuuuules actually, but if i mentally adjust some levels and basically clean up and embiggen the sound, i can totally hear it as a There Is Nothing Left To Lose album track that i like okay but don't love. i know that sounds like really cheap rockism but usually i'm on the side of the hooky pop artists... i think i just like grohl the closer he is to 80s punk/underground/college rock stuff and this album could be the punkiest thing he ever played on?

it really is kinda like an anomaly in the catalog and I like it for many of the same reasons you do. not cos "their old stuff is better", but because it's the only time they seemed to be more unrestrained with their sound and willing to include sounds from more influences.

they were already shearing off those rough edges by Colour and the Shape, which was admittedly also very good but...not the same. I was very disappointed in it when I got it as a teen but grew to like it, whereas I liked the s/t from the first listen.

their live show was great too because they were only playing like 7 or 8 songs from the album, so they had to fill out the set an did so with b-sides and soundtrack songs/covers, so "Down in the Park" got played, "Winnebago", "How I Miss You", and I swear they played an early version of Colour's "Up in Arms" but lol no camera phones then so I'm going purely from memory.

Grohl signed my ticket and flannel shirt, the latter of which my mom threw away *throws arms up*

that was actually only my third concert

also I have no idea why but "All My Life" is anotehr favorite of mine, I guess the weird dissonance of it and the chorus.

colour and the shape is very much "this former solo recording project is a serious band now :(" and it's all the good and bad that that implies. i don't dislike any songs on it but the lightness of even something like "big me" is completely lost

one by one is not a very good record but the singles are all fucking perfect lol

it was funny to listen to the 2003 Killing Joke album Dave drums on then put that one on shortly afterwards because they have some of the same demonstratively aggro energy and super chunky, simple riffs, and they must have been recorded pretty close together

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNwkN9vrUYY

i feel like i must've talked about this on this board already???? no evidence on this thread though. but this is obviously the superior arrangement and recording of this song, and one reason i will always slightly underrate colour and the shape is bc the album version of "walking after you" is so much less taut

heh I remember being confused in high school as to why the version I kept hearing on the radio was not the one on my cd. even just the "I'm on your back part", he sings eighth notes at the end instead of all quarters

that video is so.....canadian

Listening to Foo Fighters s/t, realizing that I basically know all these songs in a general "sound of the 90s" way but no longer know that they were by the Foo Fighters -- have learned furthermore (by finding it ripped in my iTunes) that I owned this CD.

Also, the toy-gun cover is what I think of as the canonical Foo Fighters graphic, I would have assumed that this was the album that has all their biggest songs on it, but apparently not

Wait it's possible there is actually no song I know to be by the Foo Fighters

"Everlong" and "Learn to Fly," I mean, these are -- songs, songs one hears -- but... they're by the FOO FIGHTERS?

“Aurora” is my fave off that album

I did an overnight road trip to LA from Sac to the entire One by One album non repeat not long after it came out & i cannot listen to it anymore as a result lmao

i loved it at the time tho

*on repeat

also “Next Year” always makes me think of the tv show “Ed” (which i loved & will never stream bc of all the great music they used that i guess they cant get clearances for ~sigh~)

"Stacked Actors" was pretty much the last Foo track that drew my attention more than, I dunno, any given Chili Peppers song post-"Scar Tissue." Even the badass Rat riff in "Stacked Actors" is offset by Dave... crooning.

The riff on that is fantastic.

Ed was a lovely show.

"stacked actors" is also notable for being the least "nice" song notorious nice man dave grohl has ever written

This is all so interesting. I think it must be that when the Foo Fighters first popped up, it was simultaneously when I had my least interest in stuff like the Foo Fighters, my least interest in listening to alt-rock radio, and maybe even no access to MTV. I knew at the time "Everlong," the "Hero" song, the Mentos video, I know a couple of other big Foo Fighters songs, but I don't know a single album track (because I've never owned an album), and I've never had a friend that was a fan of the band, either. I've always liked Grohl's drumming, and enjoyed listening to him with QotSA, Crobot, Tom Petty on SNL, etc., but the Foo Fighters ... just the wrong wavelength at the wrong time?

"Stacked Actors" i remember getting as a leaked mp3 a little before the album came out, my buddy and i were AMPED for what was clearly going to be the hardest-rocking thing ever made. at the time we were a little disappointed that the rest of the album was not really in that style but in hindsight i'm glad we got what we got instead. almost the exact opposite of our experience with the "Everlasting Gaze" MP3 (taken from some radio station preview including a DJ going "We're playin' it first.... AAAAAA-GAIN!") now that i think about it.

re: the weird stuff being sanded off, now i want to go back through The Colour and the Shape and look for it. like there's that skronky opening bit on "My Poor Brain" which could come from the same mind as "Weenie Beenie" but is now more like a little special effect flourish.

"alone + easy target" is the most nirvana-esque foos song, right? it would sounds excellent on incesticide

Dave played Kurt a demo of 'Alone + Easy Target' late in 1991, prompting Kurt to kiss him and say, "Now I don't have to be the only songwriter in the band"

Kurt also signalled an interest in recording Exhausted, though he wanted to rewrite the vocal

Dave played Kurt a demo of 'Alone + Easy Target' late in 1991, prompting Kurt to kiss him and say, "Now I don't have to be the only songwriter in the band"

― Ray Cooney as "Crotch" (stevie), Wednesday, February 10, 2021 9:42 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ugh lol

can i live in the alternate reality where there was a fourth nirvana album with grohl songs on it pls

FFs nommed for RRHOF btw

do they even have any albums in lists like ALBUMS U MUST HEAR BEFORE U DIE after like...the first two?

I'll say it again, the third album is excellent

do they even have any albums in lists like ALBUMS U MUST HEAR BEFORE U DIE after like...the first two?

this is true of a lot of inductees tbh

they'll pave the way for boston's induction

s/t > there is nothing left to lose > colour and the shape > wasting light > the rest

there is one bad song on "wasting light" and it's "these days," i have no idea why they wrote "walk" twice

they were just learning to "walk" again