Dave Grohl on the darkest album he ever heard: “The most beautifully fucked-up albums ever”
Not every band goes into making an album trying to be the next Beatles. It’s sometimes about delving deep into yourself to create the most beautifully disturbed thing that anyone has ever heard and judging by the sounds of artists from Black Sabbath to Slipknot, each of them had some darkness in their soul that they needed to get out somehow. While Dave Grohl was usually happy enough to make standard rock and roll with Foo Fighters, he knew he was dealing with something insanely weighty when heavy metal reared its head.
Then again, Grohl was never a snob when it came to heavy music. Outside of making the kind of tunes that Paul McCartney would have likely approved of, this is also the same guy who was born and bred in the punk tradition and would have loved nothing more than to thrash away on his drums for as long as he could.
While life had other plans for where Grohl would take his music, he never really lost his love for punk, either. Looking at where he went on Sonic Highways, ‘The Feast and the Famine’ still sounds as indebted to what he was listening to in the DC hardcore scene when he was still in his baby band, Scream.
While most parents would be concerned seeing their kids get into this kind of music, Grohl thought that his mother being lenient with him was half the reason why he had such a diverse music taste. He could be listening to Rush one day, The Monkees the next day, and then Slayer by the end of the week, but nothing compared to the chilling atmosphere of Celtic Frost.
Although they may have been one of the biggest names in doom metal throughout their career, it wasn’t easy to get into them without sounding like your brain was being thrown into a woodchipper half the time. The group hung things up back in the early 1990s, but Grohl considered it a dream come true seeing them return to music in 2006 with Monotheist.
The frontman was already halfway to making Foo Fighters’ next album, Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace, but he could still appreciate that one of the heaviest bands he had ever heard was back, saying, “They’d been gone for years, and then they came back with one of the doomiest, gloomiest, heaviest, darkest, most beautifully fucked-up albums ever.”
Despite having its fair share of great moments, this is the kind of album that someone really needs to be prepared for before going into it. Aside from the heavy guitars and the three-part finale that goes on for over 20 minutes, Monotheist doesn’t hold back, and for anyone who doesn’t have the nerve to stomach this kind of heaviness, no one would blame you for tapping out when you start getting uncomfortable.
But since when was any rock and roll about being comfortable from the minute that you press play? This was music meant to get a rise out of people every now and then, and as far as Grohl was concerned, this was the horror equivalent to the feel-good music that he was used to writing.
