20YAT #23 Foo Fighters – The Colour And The Shape
UK album chart peak: #3
In 1993, the NME’s John Harris suggested to Damon Albarn that Blur’s newfound Kinksian direction might be “anti-grunge”. “Well, good,” Albarn replied. “If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I’m getting rid of grunge.” Four years later, with Albarn’s Britpop chapter over, his mission had been broadly accomplished: barely any American alternative rock music had troubled British pop waters since.
One notable exception, though, was the Foo Fighters, whose first album, made entirely by Dave Grohl in the months immediately following Kurt Cobain’s suicide, had reached number three in 1995, spawning a hit single, This Is A Call, along the way. The contents of Foo Fighters, if not quite a Nirvana follow-on, was at least something, one suspected, Kurt Cobain would’ve enjoyed: noisy and alienated, crunchy and fucked off – in short, really quite grungy – it had little in common with the UK’s prevailing musical wind.
However, when the Foo Fighters returned two years later, this time as a full band fronted by Grohl, it was as if Albarn had gotten his way after all: The Colour And The Shape was, to quote Grohl’s old band, a radio-friendly unit shifter, with scant connection to its predecessor’s, and indeed grunge’s, dirt and underground authenticity. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, the album rather concisely presages the band’s permanent mutation into the kind that sells out Wembley Stadium and releases duets with Norah Jones. As a musical statement, too, it seemed to encourage the idea that even if grunge musicians (or, at least, former ones) were still kicking around in 1997, grunge itself might now be an ex-genre.
Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing: for all that The Colour And The Shape’s sheen is disconcerting, it also makes for a pretty seductive Big American FM Rock Record: the dynamic acrobatics of My Poor Brain are that much punchier given smooth production, and Grohl’s screaming register on Enough Space and Wind Up has a meatiness to it that remains fairly captivating even now.
There also aren’t many albums of any genre that contain two immutably perfect singles, but The Colour And The Shape is one. Monkey Wrench’s combination of precision-engineered mosh pit histrionics with the “one last thing before I quit” barked coda leaves it feeling like Grohl’s discovered a hitherto-untapped source of renewable energy. Everlong, meanwhile, is the album’s (and the band’s) best song by far – sensitive, tough, poignant, beautifully constructed and unashamedly huge, it almost excuses Grohl’s stylistic about-face on its own.
In a promotional interview for the Oasis greatest hits compilation in 2006, Noel Gallagher recalled being inspired to write Live Forever after hearing Nirvana: “I thought, I’m not having that. I can’t have people like that coming over here on smack saying that they hate themselves and they want to die. That’s fucking rubbish.” Perhaps the 1997 version of Grohl agreed with him: after all, the track order on The Colour And The Shape is loosely designed to reflect the arc of psychotherapeutic treatment, from despair to acceptance. The first step on that journey, it appears, was to throw off the past.
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Also out this week:
Kenickie – At The Club (Emidisc). Chart peak #9
Bentley Rhythm Ace – Bentley Rhythm Ace (Skint). Chart peak #13
