Foo Fighters - Foo Fighters (Japan)

Essentially a collection of solo home recordings by Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters' eponymous debut is a modest triumph. Driven by big pop melodies and distorted guitars, Foo Fighters do strongly recall Nirvana, only with a decidedly lighter approach. If Kurt Cobain's writing occasionally recalled John Lennon, Dave Grohl's songs are reminiscent of Paul McCartney -- they're driven by large, instantly memorable melodies, whether it's the joyous outburst of "This Is a Call" or the gentle pop of "Big Me." That doesn't mean Grohl shies away from noise; toward the end of the record, he piles on several thrashers that make more sense as pure aggressive sound than as songs. Since he recorded the album by himself, they aren't as powerful as most bands’ primal sonic workouts, but the results are damn impressive for a solo musician. Nevertheless, they aren't as strong as his fully formed pop songs, and that's where the true heart of the album lies. Foo Fighters has a handful of punk-pop gems that show, given the right musicians and songwriters, the genre had not entirely become a cliché by the middle of the '90s.

Dee Gees - Hail Satin

In late February 2021, less than two weeks after Foo Fighters released their 10th album in more than a quarter century as a band, the arena-rock placebo Medicine at Midnight (rumor has it Bill Gates put a chip in it!), they unceremoniously unveiled a disco alter ego. Billed, semi-funnily, as the Dee Gees, the Dave Grohl-led six-piece premiered their cover of “You Should Be Dancing” on BBC Radio 2. Grohl—ever the candid every-dude—said that the falsetto experiment was inspired by last December’s fascinating HBO documentary about the Bee Gees—never mind that he hadn’t actually seen it. The stakes could hardly have been lower. The results were hard to fault. Recorded with one-man multi-platinum mint Greg Kurstin, the veteran band’s stab at the Bee Gees’ nuke-proof 1976 hit—the first in a run of disco-pop smashes that would appear on the next year’s gazillion-selling Saturday Night Fever soundtrack—is muscular but essentially faithful. When Grohl channels Barry Gibb’s horndog dancefloor exhortations (“My woman gives me pow-wah!”), it feels as self-consciously silly as disco’s monoculture phase gave audiences a license to be, from Studio 54 to suburban strip malls. Thoroughly harmless, it’s kind of a hoot. It would’ve made a fine novelty single.