Foo Fighters Album Recommendations

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Foo Fighters

[#] Foo Fighters (1995)

Dave Grohl used to be weird, man.

Reviewed October 28, 2018

The tale of so many other top-shelf bands, Foo Fighters was once the domain of a young man regrouping from loss and producing music with an edge, a hook, and a sense of humor. Later on, it became the vaguely acceptable snack food rock that we think of when we think of the Foos, but when it came to their debut, Dave Grohl was just out to have a good time. Too often does 1995's Foo Fighters get framed in terms of Kurt Cobain's death, but that really ignores this record's defining traits: Dave's ability to write a hook fit for a beluga, and his sense of experimentation. And boy, are both are on display here!

Focusing on the former point, the first half of the record stands tall for essentially being a musical gumball machine. Through the violated stomp of "I'll Stick Around", the rejected Nirvana cut "Alone + Easy Target", or the Mentos rock of "Big Me", it stands to reason that, if Dave wasn't a songwriting heavyweight from the start, he certainly knew how to fake it. It's somewhere around "Floaty" that the record might start to lose people, as Dave experiments more with shoegaze and hardcore punk while never losing that poppy edge. Take note of closer "Exhausted", a plaintive plea for rest amid a wall of noise the Foos would never revisit. Foo Fighters goes down easy and sticks with you for a long time.