The grunge album Dave Grohl hailed as “a f***ing masterpiece”
For someone that has been in the rock world for decades, it’s hard to think of anyone that has less of an ego than Dave Grohl.
He has every right to act like one of the biggest gods of rock and roll, but whenever you see him on the stage, off the stage, or out in the wild, he seems like one of the biggest superfans of music that just so happens to be in one of the biggest bands in the world. But beyond having love for nearly every single subgenre of rock, there are a few times where he could tap into something a bit darker than what everyone expected from the guy who made ‘Learn to Fly’.
But Grohl’s taste for dark music makes a lot of sense. He came from the punk rock scene long before he made it big, and even before he started working on his chops and becoming one of the heaviest drummers that anyone had ever seen, he was listening to those old Metallica records and trying to make riffs that had that much staying power. And let’s not forget about his work with Probot, either.
Something that heavy was so far removed from Foo Fighters that it was virtually unrecognisable, but hearing him work with Cronos from Venom and Lemmy from Motorhead works shockingly well. His sense of rhythm always had the kind of muscle that those bands needed when making their best material, but when it comes to making the darkest albums ever made, not everything necessarily needs to be super fast.
After all, the first Black Sabbath is fairly midtempo in its pace, but when the title track starts with that menacing riff, it still feels like the end of the world taking place between the speakers. And for someone that ends up finding their feet in a city like Seattle, Grohl knew the power of making something that was both heavy and slow at the same time, especially when listening to what Nirvana’s Bleach sounded like before he even joined.
A lot of his greatest songs were centred around a groove, but what Mark Lanegan was doing went beyond that standard rhythmic pulse whenever he played. Screaming Trees were already one of the greatest bands that the Seattle scene ever produced, but when left to his own devices, Lanegan’s delivery was part way between Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, and what many people would imagine Lucifer would sound like. He could sound downright evil in some spots, but when listening to his first solo record, Grohl couldn’t help but see the beauty in all of the tunes.
This was the kind of songwriter that knew a thing or two about pain, and Grohl couldn’t deny that Lanegan had made a benchmark for alternative music, saying, “[It’s] a f***ing masterpiece. It’s one of my most influential records. I didn’t necessarily know him as the Screaming Trees singer, I just knew him as himself. It’s heartbreaking.” But it also helps having two very important people in the band as well.
While Nirvana was always a tightknit group, getting Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic to play in the studio band was a work of genius. This was that sweet spot right before they began work on Nevermind, so you can hear them slowly starting to figure out what made them sound so great when working through Lanegan’s take on the Leadbelly song ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’, which Cobain would borrow a few years later on MTV Unplugged.
Make no mistake, The Winding Sheet is by no means one of the most peppy records of all time, but whenever you listen to it, there’s a certain beauty that rubs off on every tune. Lanegan wasn’t someone interested in making pretty little tunes, but when hearing him sing, there’s hardly a single note where he doesn’t sound sincere.
