Wasting Light

Dear Rosemary - Foo Fighters (mp3)

On April 8, the Foo Fighters released the best rock album of the year.

It’s also the best rock album of the last three years.

It’s also quite possibly the best rock album of the 21st Century.

Wasting Light was the long-awaited and heavily-hyped reunion of Nevermind producer Butch Vig and Dave Grohl. Grohl intimated in several interviews that he avoided working with Vig because he didn’t want to appear too eager to feast on the carcass of the band they both loved and an album that kicked their careers into the stratosphere.

They recorded Wasting Light in Grohl’s garage. Like, a garage on a house where he really lives with his wife and his kids. And Grohl doesn’t live in some Trump-esque megamansion. It’s just a really nice house with a nice garage. And a lot of expensive equipment above in a “monitoring room.”



The album was crafted in a sweet spot in Grohl’s life, I think. He was finally willing to accept that he and Foo are beyond having to prove they’re not Nirvana or riding on his former band’s coattails. And as any real fan of either band would (I’d like to think) quickly acknowledge, Foo’s sound and Nirvana’s don’t have a damn thing to do with one another beyond that both use, like, electric guitars ‘n’ stuff. Wings stole more from the Beatles than Foo did from Nirvana.

At the same time he was finally releasing the ghost of Kurt Cobain, he was getting comfortable with family life and being a father. And part of being comfortable with domesticity is having the unbridled desperation to do stuff that makes you more than just a dad and a husband. In Grohl’s case, he’s gotta get his groove on.

None of the songs from Wasting Light seem to be inspired by domesticated life -- Dave Grohl ain’t Lori McKenna. It’s mostly just songs about heartbreaks, screwed-up relationships, and angry people. The album knows what it wants to be when it grows up: a punching upbeat rock assault with the heart of a pop classic.

Foo songs have never yearned to explore the depths of the ocean. They’re fairly happy to stay up near the surface in the daylight zone. Once in a while, they’ll drift down into the twilight zone, but Foo will never be a band in the midnight zone of lyrical depth. They’re not Radiohead.

You want deep, musical aggression and anger? Oh yeah, they'll go to the ocean floor. But they lyrics rarely go down there with them.

I first paid real attention to the Foo Fighters when their song “My Hero” showed up in the movie Varsity Blues, so it’s not like I’ve been blindly loyal to or crazy about them from the get-go. I wouldn’t even say I became a full-fledged fan until their 2005 double-album In Your Honor.

Grohl has never come across as a tortured artist (see: YouTube clip above). Maybe that’s why some people hate him. He’s that guy who was somehow both the president of his fraternity but also ridonkulously talented as a musician. His personality has always reminded me of the Beastie Boys, guys who are in on the joke of their success and who realize that superstardom is a little too goofy and easily attained, yet you know that when those two bands are behind closed doors and working on their music, they’re serious and intense. Making music is important and heavy and serious shit.

You know this because he pulls in none other than Bob Mould -- The Master of Serious, the King of Heavy -- for a guest appearance (“Dear Rosemary”), and it’s a beautiful thing.

What makes Wasting Light an album of transcendent greatness is that it holds its strength from start to finish. If you like the first song, you’ll like all of them. You’d think the history of recorded music would be full of albums that stay strong from start to finish, but it’s just not true, especially of albums with pop sensibilities. Sometimes the pop misses the mark. Or sometimes the gear-shift doesn’t quite work.

Everything works here. Beginning to end.

They conclude the album with “Walk,” my favorite ever Foo song, the kind of song that, if the band quit tomorrow, would be one helluva last song on a last album.

I thought this might be the best album of 2011 about a week after I got it, but almost three months later, it just gets better, and bigger, and more impressive. It’s one for the ages.

The Best CD of the Decade?

The Sheds--"Reflection Of The Sun" (mp3)
The Sheds--"All The Right Things" (mp3)
The Sheds--"Mtn Cat" (mp3)

“Best of” lists are surfacing everywhere right now. In fact, before this week is finished, you’ll also have appraisals of the best CDs and best songs from your friends here at Bottom Of The Glass. But I thought I’d kick things off by biting off a whole lot more than I could possibly chew. So here goes. As this first decade of the 21st century prepares to come to a close, let me deliver the news that the BEST CD of our nearly-done decade is You’ve Got A Light by The Sheds.

No doubt, there are several problems with this proclamation. First, you’ve most likely never heard of the Sheds. Second, the CD was never released, at least not in any tangible way. You could download the songs off of the Internet. Third, the Sheds were an unsigned band, as far as I can tell, and have now forfeited even the rights to the website address where you could download their music, most likely because my detective work tells me that they are no longer together. So what I’m claiming has risen above the Coldplays and Kanyes, the Nellys and the Nickelbacks, is an amateurishly-produced set of recordings by a flash-in-the-pan duo who never earned a dime from it.

To complicate matters even more, I don’t own the CD in question. Oh, I used to have it on a previous Ipod, owned all three the Sheds’ CDs as a matter of fact, but when that Ipod flatlined, I thought ‘No worries, I’ll just download them again” and never got around to it until it was too late. Now they’re gone, though you can hear some of the band’s stuff on their MySpace page. Already, though, they are something of an archeological memory I’m trying to piece together.

So be it.

For a CD to earn this kind of high praise from me, it has to have either reinforced or changed the way I think about music. This one did both. There’s not much to the Shed’s music: acoustic and electric guitars, sometimes bass, drums, and cheap synthesizers. But the best music shows us that we didn’t need more than we got. Though stripped-down, the songs sound polished and complete. To add to the homegrown feel, the songs call on friends from the Cincinnati area to help out on the songs. In fact, the songs often name-check those friends. In fact, “Reflection of the Sun” even builds the participation of those friends into the lyrics of the song:

“Hey, look, here come the Seedy Seeds!
Would youse agree that people need sunlight?”

And then the Seedy Seeds, Uncle Smokin’ Joe, and Matthew Shelton all sing the lyrics written for them.

In my mind’s perfect world, You’ve Got A Light spawned three hit singles. “Reflection Of The Sun,” one of the catchiest sing-a-longs in whoknowswhen, busted onto the charts out of nowhere. Like a clever YouTube video, incredible word of mouth fueled its rise. The band wisely followed up with the toned-down, acoustic “All The Right Things,” another positive song, this time about how things will work out . But it was the release of the third single, “Mtn Cat,” that guaranteed You’ve Got A Light a long run on the charts. A kind of slacker anthem about a bunch of musicians about to get together to jam in a trailer, its call-and-response chorus is a hymn of affirmation and friendship (and good rockin'):

“What we gonna when the boys get here?
When the boys come, we will all rock the trailer.
What we gonna do if the boys don’t rock?
The boys will rock, yes, the boys will rock.
Kind bud, can I have another beer?
There’s a cooler in the front and a cooler in the rear.
Might I sample of your fine mashed potatoes?
Better have some now, there ain’t no later on.”

Seems like silly lyrics, I know. But there is no music from the last decade that has made me feel better about living than the Sheds’. It’s simple. It’s real. It stays with you. That, I promise.The Sheds reflect the changes that have taken place in music. Tangible CDs don’t matter as much. Music companies don’t matter as much. They also remind us how, with the explosion of outlets of information, in the 21st century, it is paradoxically easier for a band to get heard and harder to achieve success.

Who even knows how many Sheds are out there? This was not the greatest decade for popular music, with many major artists either losing their inspiration or spinning their wheels not quite sure how to proceed or putting out enjoyable, but minor, works. It may be time once again for the hometown, homemade music scenes to assert themselves and take us all to some new musical places. Long live the Sheds!


VISIONARY RUNNERS-UP:

Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Though at first this seemed like the weirdest release by a weird band, the more you listen to it, the more you connect with, and the band’s you-set-the price download scheme forced everyone to rethink the marketing and sale of music, paving the way for Paul Westerberg’s 49:00 and beyond.

Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising. Though its appeal is, by now, time-specific, there was a period of years when this felt to me like the only proper response to 9/11, focusing as it did largely on the human tragedy rather than the politics.

Ryan Adams and The Cardinals’ Cold Roses. The most complete top-to-bottom CD release by a “major” artist this decade, Cold Roses is the mature vision of a songwriter at his peak, finally with the band that allows him to provide the proper musical settings for the songs. Sure, it channels the ghosts of Gram Parsons and the Grateful Dead, but why is that a bad thing?

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s eponymous CD. This one first revealed the powerful influence that the Internet could have on music sales and started a revolution of self-promoting bands and bloggers.

These songs by the Sheds are available here and, most likely, nowhere else..