Considering the demise of Nirvana, Foo Fighters seemed the unlikely champions to rise from the ashes of grunge and it’s premiere godhead, but as they, or more specifically Dave Grohl (he recorded the the majority of the album by himself before recruiting a band), proved on the self-titled 1995 debut, Foo Fighters weren’t just another one-off project. The 90’s had already seen a plethora of burn-outs, fade-away’s, and the whole gambit of downward spirals, but what Foo Fighters did was establish a new institution, casting away the dregs and disdain of the old school, and embracing something much more spritely and smart. Foo Fighters is a strange album considering what grunge already was, and it hinges more upon the notion that it is a “meta-grunge” album; that is to say, it replicates the same dynamic and stylistics, but it’s much more amorphous and effervescent. The yawning fuzz of “X-Static” or the tongue-in-cheek crank of “For All the Cows” draw on shoegaze as well as modern rock, ignoring the tenets of grunge to be overbearingly anti- or malevolent towards more commercial forms. It is the strangely a-harmonic dissonance, bathed in chorused guitars and big drum production that gave the Foo Fighters their original sonic fingerprint and signature, appropriating grunge, but still progressively pushing the idea and mantra forward. Since that time, the Foo Fighters have shifted from a second coming to a mainstream mainstay, and for all intents and purposes have lost sight of their original sound and uniqueness, but for a fleeting moment, they saved rock in the aftermath of the cataclysmic demise of grunge in the 1990’s.
Listen to “Weenie Beanie” (Live at the Pheonix Festival, 1996) and “Big Me”
Download “Foo Fighters“
