The Foo Fighters Help 2011 in Its Effort to Sound as Much Like the 1990s as Possible

Off the top of my head, I can think of two musical performers for whom I have high hopes, despite the fact that they have disappointed me a lot over the last few years. The first is Elvis Costello, who almost had me at Momofuku and then lost me again at Secret, Profane, and Sugarcane. I have been told that last year’s National Ransom is good, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. The other performer is Dave Grohl, whose music has been the happy soundtrack to quite a bit of my life – as Nirvana’s drummer, as the Foo Fighters’ singer, and with his contribution to the Queens of the Stone Age album Songs for the Deaf. But since about 2005, with the release In Your Honor, I’ve been on a bit of a break from Grohl’s music.

Last year, Grohl played with Them Crooked Vultures (featuring his buddies John Paul Jones and Josh “Rhymes with Tommy” Homme) at Coachella. I tried really hard to like their album, but they forgot to write songs for it so I couldn’t quite pull that off. It was great to hear Grohl play live, though, and it reminded me that the dude is 1) an incredibly talented musician and 2) a seemingly likable guy (I say “seemingly” because I’ve never met the man, but every time I see or read an interview with him, he strikes me as a person of good humor and dignity).

So though my expectations are low for Wasting Light, Grohl’s new album with the Foo Fighters, I have to admit I almost desperately want to like it. The last really great Foo Fighters record, for me, was 1997′s The Colour and the Shape. Yes, it was an arena rock record (or what I like to call a Big Rock Record), but it showed off Grohl’s ability to write catchy pop songs and then dress them up like alternative rock radio hits. And the video for “Everlong” was rad as hell.

If you’ve felt the same way I have about the last few Foo Fighters albums, you might view Wasting Light as an almost shameless attempt to reestablish some manner of credibility – the album is produced by Butch Vig, it features guest appearances by Krist Novoselic (he was in one of the dead-end bands that Grohl played in before hitting the big time with the Foo Fighters) and Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould, and the packaging boasts that it was recorded directly to analog tape in Dave Grohl’s garage. For skeptics, the albums also comes with your very own slice of the master tape, tucked neatly into the booklet. Given my sunny disposition toward Mr. Grohl, I’m inclined to see these touches as signals of his earnest desire to return to making simple, primal rock music (and then destroy the masters!). In Your Honor and the one after it (the one with the long, stupid title) were definitely bloated from a production standpoint and the songs I heard were structurally similar to their 1990s stuff but without the same organic energy. So I’m going to give the Foo Fighters the benefit of the doubt on this one. Perhaps such a calculated shift to an “as live as possible” sound really helped them to get excited about making Wasting Light, which is the most energetic Foo Fighters release I’ve heard in years.

As I’ve said, Grohl used to be able to pen one helluva catchy chorus (even on the screamier songs like “Wind Up”), and he’s mostly found his way back to that on the new record. “Rope,” “Arlandria,” and “Back and Forth” are all pretty infectious and yet still radio-friendly in the way that songs like “Everlong” and “Monkeywrench” were. Though Grohl has boasted that no acoustic guitars were even seen around his garage during the recording of Wasting Light, it still has its ballady moments, including “These Days” and “I Should Have Known,” the latter of which will probably be assumed by lots of people to be about Kurt Cobain. I’m not going to assume that it is, because I feel really weird speculating about people’s feelings when they’ve lost a friend to suicide.

Maybe it’s a product of low expectations, but I quite enjoy Wasting Light. It’s the first Foo Fighters album since The Colour and the Shape (was that really 14 years ago? Sweet Zombie Jesus, it was) that I’ve wanted to listen to more than once. Sure, it can sound a little Queens of the Stone Age-y at times (especially on “Bridge Burning”), but that’s not really a bad thing. Grohl’s aesthetic is a little more poppy than Josh Homme’s and your enjoyment of Wasting Light might hinge on how much you think that’s a good thing. Foo Fighters fans who have found themselves either half-heartedly defending or ignoring (as I have) their last few records should be quite happy with it. It would be easy to say that Wasting Light is the Foo Fighters’ Accelerate, but that’s understating things a bit. Wasting Light, though not flawless, is better than Accelerate overall.

Grohl has made much in interviews about the unique sound you can get recording straight to tape, and he’s right. But that sound might be partly responsible for the fact that Wasting Light is a little light in terms of sonic diversity. That’s slightly offset by the violin and accordion parts on “I Should Have Known,” but basically, you can divide the album into Heavy Guitar Rock songs (“Bridge Burning,” “Rope,” and “White Limo”), Guitar Pop Rock songs (“Back and Forth” and “Walk”) and Patented Foo Fighters Power Ballads (“These Days” and “I Should Have Known”) and pick your favorites.

I find it kind of interesting that Dave Grohl starts Wasting Light screaming “These are my famous last words” and ends it on “Walk” by screaming “I never wanna die.” In fact, the now firmly middle-aged Grohl ponders death quite a bit on the album, telling “Dear Rosemary” that “youth ain’t gonna change the way you die.” I think it’s probably natural to take stock of things when you hit your forties (ask me again when I get there), because that’s a decade where you’re not young anymore but you’re certainly not old. That the Foo Fighters are still able to rock out in a satisfying way – and sound like they really enjoy doing it – at this point in their careers is, by my reckoning, pretty fucking awesome.

I didn’t really have an album in mind that I specifically hoped the Foo Fighters would make; I just knew I didn’t want to hear something like “Pretender” or “Best of You” ever again. Wasting Light’s worst songs beat those two clunkers by a damn sight and if it’s a little radio-friendly, so what? Nirvana was radio-friendly at one time, too. It doesn’t mean the music is bad. It means that, even with all the stupidity driving commercial rock radio these days, stations that usually bombard you with shit like Nickelback, Creed, and Papa Roach can occasionally slip up and play something listenable.

Great Fucking Albums #24: Siamese Dream

Well, I said it was probably time to do this and so it looks like I’m a dude of my word.

The 1990s were a good time to listen to rock music, because the radio actually managed (on occasion) to play music that was good. In Oregon, we had Portland’s 94.7 KNRK, the station that first introduced me to the Smashing Pumpkins. That introduction, crucial as it was to my transition from person who owned Hysteria on vinyl to person who owns albums of which he’s unashamed, came in the form of “Today,” the hit single (I believe the first among many) from Siamese Dream. I was all of thirteen years old and living with the first of two alcoholic step-dads that would make Hamm’s-swilling appearances in my adolescence. I still listened to my music on cassettes back then, and a friend of mine copied Siamese Dream onto a blank cassette for me (he had the CD and it can be safely inferred that he therefore had the better childhood); I promptly wore the cassette out (a disadvantage of the format. Come to think of it, portability was probably the only real advantage of cassettes). I must confess that, at first, I pretty much listened to “Cherub Rock” and “Today” over and over.

But I’m older and wiser now, and I can safely say that Siamese Dream was one of the best albums of the 1990s (yes, I know about Nevermind. I know. Settle down). For one thing, few albums of that decade announced themselves with the authority of “Cherub Rock,” a song that should be included in every video game that dares to place the word “guitar” anywhere near the word “hero.” That riff burned its way into my psyche when I was a teenager and it’s one of the few things I like to remember from that time in my life.

Like many of my favorite rock albums, Siamese Dream sounds better the louder you hear it (assuming you don’t push your speakers to the point of distorting the sound) and the one thing my sad little thirteen-year-old self managed to get right was listening to this album with the volume cranked up in my shitty Walkman headphones until I was practically swimming in Billy Corgan and Jame’s Iha’s über-distorted guitars. I didn’t know it at the time, but Siamese Dream got its dynamics from the Pixies and its guitar style from Dinosaur Jr.. That combination is as winning today as it was back then, although the modern incarnation of the Pumpkins doesn’t seem to be able to pull it off.

Was Siamese Dream pretentious? You bet your ass it was pretentious! Two songs approach seven minutes in length and one (“Silverfuck”) gets dangerously close to the nine minute mark. Length alone doesn’t make a song pretentious, but if a band is willing to linger that long in a tune, it suggests to me that said band may be overestimating the importance of their art. Billy Corgan definitely overestimated the importance of his art (to the point that he was deeply, apparently permanently offended when Pavement made a half-hearted, one-line crack about the Smashing Pumpkins in “Range Life”) and he continues to do so to this day. But that doesn’t change the fact that Siamese Dream is fucking awesome.

There’s the aforementioned guitar tone; I mean, holy shit. Yeah, it’s J. Mascis-aping, but it also somehow turns Mascis’s frenetic, furious playing up to eleven while giving it a lot more focus. Even at its wildest (like, say, the guitar solo on “Cherub Rock” or the one on “Geek U.S.A.”), there is not a single note on Siamese Dream that hasn’t been fussed over, largely by Mr. Corgan, who frequently overdubbed James Iha and D’arcy’s parts with his own playing (and then overdubbed his parts with himself – between forty and one hundred times, depending on the song and who you ask). According to some sources, Corgan and producer Butch Vig could spend hours working on one 45-second section of a song.

And, though I don’t have much interest in looking up the lyrics that I can’t understand on this album (and there are many), Corgan’s vocal melodies are uniformly excellent on Siamese Dream. They’re catchy but not overly simplistic, possibly because Corgan controlled nearly every second of the recording process with an iron fist.

The result of all this fisting and fussing (sorry, couldn’t resist) was a bloated, pretentious, $250,000 over budget masterpiece. Though the 1995 follow-up, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was quite well-received, I don’t think the Smashing Pumpkins ever made an album as completely great as Siamese Dream. It swung for the fences on every single track, and the number of home runs it managed to hit in 62 minutes is astounding. In a decade that would see a steady and precipitous decline in the quality of Big Rock Records, Siamese Dream was a brilliant Big Rock Record, which was exactly what Billy Corgan wanted it to be.

In a week when massive lead singer ego has been on my mind, Siamese Dream forces me to consider the possible benefits of having a self-obsessed, tyrannical asshole for a vocalist. There’s little argument that Billy Corgan’s ego was the driving force behind the album, but was it worth it? As a selfish listener, I’d rather have Siamese Dream in my record collection than have Billy Corgan be a nice person, but I don’t have to deal with him. As a musician, I’d definitely be the kind of guy to get in fist fights with someone like Corgan; I like bands that I play in to be democratic and Corgan, like Axl Rose, seems like a musical fascist. After Siamese Dream was released in 1993, Corgan, in a move that must have been deeply inspiring to a young Julian Casablancas, told Spin, “I’m surrounded by these people who I care about very much, yet they continue to keep failing me.” Fortunately, the most Siamese Dream-like band I’ve heard in 2011, The Joy Formidable, shares Corgan’s desire for an epic rock sound but not his flagrant disrespect (bordering on seething disdain) for their fellow band members. At least, I haven’t read any interviews with Ritzy Bryan where she’s shit-talking the rest of the band.

So, bands like The Joy Formidable and friends, take Siamese Dream as a cautionary tale: naked ambition (which is the name of my Madonna cover band) and a lot of ego can get you far, but if you follow Billy Corgan’s swan dive (or is it a Zwan dive?) from awesomeness since making this album, you might do well to stop and consider whether or not it’s worth it. Performer discretion is advised.

The (Siamese) Dream of the 90s is Alive and Well in the Joy Formidable

If you’re around my age, you were probably in or nearly in or just barely out of junior high when Smashing Pumpkins released Siamese Dream. I still remember the way it felt listening to that band tear into “Cherub Rock” (easily among the best opening tracks of the 1990s) – it was a grandiose, endearingly pretentious song which was totally okay because I was a grandiose, possibly not-endearingly pretentious teenager. I still love Siamese Dream, even if it was probably a symptom of the egotistical excess that would later lead Billy Corgan completely over the edge into Batshit Crazytown.

Siamese Dream is on my mind at the moment because The Big Roar, the debut album by Welsh trio The Joy Formidable, reminds me so much of it. It’s a Big Rock Record at a time when Big Rock Records honestly aren’t that good. When I think of “Big Rock” nowadays, I think of Nickelback and have the sudden desire to stick pins in my ears. But The Big Roar (let me just say this about that title, by the way: to me, it strikes exactly the right balance of audacity and pretension) desperately wants – nay, it longs – to be a Big Rock Record in the way that Siamese Dream wanted to be a Big Rock Record (which is kind of the way Ten wanted to be a Big Rock Record and an Indie Grunge Record).

Given the scope of its ambition, The Big Roar is inevitably flawed. Album opener “The Ever-Changing Spectrum of a Lie” is probably four minutes too long and stuffed with so much stuff that you almost come away thinking that The Joy Formidable were worried they wouldn’t get to record another song and, in a simultaneous fit of pique and bravado, they just put every musical idea ever into seven minutes and forty-four seconds. The song itself has some great melodic moments and foreshadows an album full of a whole lot more noise than you might think three people could make. They only really overindulge like “The Ever-Changing Spectrum of a Lie” a couple more times on the album (at the end of the otherwise sublime “Whirring,” the instrumental meandering becomes almost hilarious), which is why I find myself consistently willing to forgive The Big Roar for its worst behavior.

Before we go much further, I feel like I should point out that I kind of love pretentious bands, so long as they’re the right kind of pretentious. I realize that seems like an arbitrary distinction, but bear with me a minute and I’ll see if I can clarify it a little. For me, the bad kind of pretentious is “Welcome to the Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance. The song, apart from being a blatant Queen pastiche, tries to create a false sense of sorrow so that it can then anoint itself the anthem that helps the listener transcend said fictional sorrow. On the other hand, I think Yo La Tengo is a good kind of pretentious. Yes, some of their songs are indulgent (some are even awful; more than one of my friends has dismissed Yo La Tengo as “indie for indie’s sake,” a charge I can’t entirely dismiss), but they have a broad musical knowledge that they have channeled into a varied and often beautiful musical oeuvre. Bands that are the good kind of pretentious are bound to fail at times, but their good moments are often fucking brilliant (I guess the Flaming Lips are also a good pretentious band).

The good moments on The Big Roar are great – “Whirring” (its end notwithstanding), “I Don’t Want to See You Like This,” and closer “The Greatest Light is the Greatest Shade” are worth the price of admission on their own. And even the bad moments are more unnecessary than outright awful (like “Maruyama”), thanks largely to Ritzy Bryan’s zealous delivery of every line she sings. The Big Roar doesn’t just remind me of Siamese Dream because of its pretension – the sonics on this album are straight out of 1994 and I mean that in the best possible way. The vocal melodies are strong (a less forgiving critic might say “un-fucking-subtle,” but one critic’s crippling lack of subtlety is another critic’s favorite Bikini Kill record), the guitars are pretty much always distorted and generously slathered over every single song, and the drums are straight out of the Big Rock Drummer Handbook (originally written by John Bonham and then edited in later editions by Dave Grohl. For drummers of a slightly different bent, the Kickass Punk Drummer Handbook was begun by Topper Headon in the late 70s. Heroin addiction prevented him from finishing the tome so Tobi Vail and Janet Weiss completed it with authority in the 1990s. Further revision has not been required). The Joy Formidable’s sound is built to fill stadiums and I have no doubt that it will in the very near future.

So you might have guessed by now that there isn’t much original about The Joy Formidable, but I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. A guy fucking a microphone while shitting in a bass drum and shouting random words in a made-up language would be an original album for sure, but it almost definitely (almost – we must keep open minds here) would not be good. Plenty of good bands work within familiar tropes (the Grammy-winning Black Keys, anyone?) and I think it’s enough that The Joy Formidable does a lot to redeem the idea of arena rock.

One of my biggest problems (and I have many) with Big Rock Records is that not very many of them feature strong female vocalists (don’t say Evanescence, okay? Just don’t). The Joy Formidable has Ritzy Bryan, who is not only a great singer but also a talented guitar player (there’s nothing too flashy about her playing, but there’s some incredible textures on The Big Roar); she’s almost like a Big Rock Marissa Paternoster. I’m not saying, by the way, that the Screaming Females’ sound couldn’t fill stadiums. But I think their stuff is actually better for tearing stadiums down.

For the most part, The Joy Formidable manages to make a heady elixir out of audacity, pretension, and good, old-fashioned volume. The Big Roar is by no means a perfect album – the song titles (“Llaw = Wall,” “The Ever-Changing Spectrum of a Lie,” and so on) stretch the boundaries of tolerable pretension – but I think people who have any fond memories of 1990s alternative rock radio (I grew up with Portland’s 94.7 FM and they might be the only radio station I listen to when I make my return to the gorgeous, soggy northwest) will find a lot to love here.