Product Description

The side-project of Foo Fighters/Nirvana man Dave Grohl is a veritable who's who of 80's metal. Here Grohl has written and recorded tracks with a specific 80's rock band in mind for each, with the vocalists of the aforementioned band's singing on them. Thus collaborations with members of Motorhead,St. Vitius, Cathedral, Trouble, King Diamond, Celtic Frost,DRI, Voivoid, Venom, COC and Sepultura as well as apperances by Jack Black and Soundgarden's Kim Thayll. Released on the underground Southern Lord label.

Track Listing

1. Centuries of Sin feat Cronos
2. Red War feat Max Cavalera
3. Shake Your Blood feat Lemmy
4. Access Babylon feat Mike Dean
5. Silent Spring feat Kurt Brecht
6. Ice Cold Man feat Lee Dorrian
7. The Emerald Law feat Wino
8. Big Sky feat Tom G Warrior
9. Dictatorsaurus feat Snake
10. My Tortured Soul feat Eric Wagner
11. Sweet Dreams feat King Diamond

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19300 in Music
• Released on: 2004-02-16
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

Pro-biotic Probot
Evil in a plastic case - best thing I've heard for eons. You can see Grohl smiling as he put this together.

Foos fans tried this? Don't they know anything?
Seriously, some Foo Fighters fans bought this and were surprised they didn't like it? Can't be very big Foo Fighters fans if they didn't know what Grohl was up to with this project before it came out.

Everyone with a modicum of music knowledge knew this was Grohl playing drums on some seriously heavy metal. Not just '80s metal, as one reviewer seems to think, but black and doom stuff. Just look at the vocalists. Cronos (Venom, black metal), Lee Dorrian (Cathedral, doom metal), Wino (St Vitus, doom metal) and so on. The only "'80s metal" singer there is King Diamond. And Lemmy, as we all know, is a genre unto himself.

Now, whether or not you like this album is going to come down to one thing (or 11). Whether or not you like the singers. The fact that Grohl's on it doesn't matter in the slightest. It could be any half-decent drummer. It really doesn't matter. The different voices are what will make, or break this album for you. If you don't like the voices, you won't like the album, it's as simple as that. Of course, if you don't like extreme metal and are buying it just because you're a Grohl fan then you're not much of a well informed Grohl fan, because you're not going to like this one bit.

Personally, I'm a big fan of Dorrian, Lemmy, Cronos, Mike Dean and Wino. I don't like Max Cavalera for the most part, or King Diamond, and the others I was hithtofor unfamiliar with. So it's a 50/50 album for me, going in. Coming out, it's better than that. The other singers proved to be pretty good.

Still don't like Cavalera though. His brother got all the talent there.

'80s metal: a postmodern but thankfully not 'ironic' take
1980s heavy metal is a thorny area for sure; so much utter crap -the LA hairspray bands, but also the equally tedious Bay Area thrash stuff. You wouldn't expect Dave Grohl to have any time for the former, as indeeed he doesn't, but thankfully there's none of the latter here either, execpt DRI's "Silent Spring"; a song so dumb you'd expect to find your head bouncing off your shoulders attached to a Slinky, a la Fraggle Rock, while listening to it. It's a shame, when you consider how, say, Suicidal Tendencies' Mike Muir could have made a much sharper lyric out of the same subject matter. I guess Our Dave was never a Suicyco, though. Never mind.
What is very striking is how all these sub-Sabbath doom metal singers sound like/actually are utter nutters. Cathedral's Lee Dorrian sounds like a swaggering, leering drunk (I love how "Ice Cold Man" lurches into an enthusiastically inebriated gallop halfway through). Wino of Saint Vitus etc. sounds like a 200-year-old mystic sage as played by Christopher Lee (I love "Emerald Law" period, especially the screeching single-note No Wave-ish guitar solo). Tom G Warrior sounds like a spirit medium channelling a deceased German porn star. And Trouble's Eric Wagner bears a hell of a vocal resemblance to David Bowie!!
Cronos and King Diamond beat them all to the punch, though, the latter in particular slam-dunking Rob Halford, Freddie Mercury, him out of Cradle Of Filth, AND that silly little man from Muse with the most sheerly barmy falsetto squeaks and shrieks ever conjured out of the human larynx. It's silly for sure, but even those who disdain this sort of music may be briefly jealous that they could never sing like that.
The downsides: god bless Lemmy and all, but he sounds out of place here. Apart from anything else, he lacks the theatrical flair of the other singers. And while "Red War" is an awesome slab of tumbling tribal-industrial metal, Max Cavalera has always been a bit of a pillock. His newfound obession with Rastafarianism I find distinctly...dodgy.
Grohlio's music is stellar throughout, and his drumming in particular scales new heights, able to mimic the styles his collaberators are used to working in with disquieting accuracy (the tribal percussion on "Red War", the coiled avant-garde rhythms on "Dictatorsaurus", the 100mph "Access Babylon", which also has these great sour-sounding guitar squeals in the chorus).
And check out Jack Black on the hidden song...far from being a celebrityfest of mutual backslapping a la Tenacious D, the man sounds as if he's drunk his own body weight in washing-up liquid just to get that over-the-top vibe.
A great, neat compendium of some of the 1980s' most scorned, but most genuinely countercultural stuff.