group Foo Fighters 10 albums into these categories;
FooArchive
396 posts
Essential (2)
Superior (4)
Good (3)
Avoid (1)*
Paul Brannigan has written a Foo Fighters Buyers Guide for the next issue of Classic Rock & I was wondering how closely it matches most peoples take on the band's output.
(* - the categories are just Classic Rock’s rating system for these guides. PB points out he doesn’t think the album should be avoided as such)
Comments
Oh no this is too difficult!! And besides, i really don't want to put any albums in the 'avoid' category
Essential:
The Colour and the Shape
Wasting Light
Superior:
Foo Fighters
There Is Nothing Left to Lose
Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
Medicine at Midnight
Good:
One by One
In Your Honor
Sonic Highways
Avoid:
Concrete & Gold
NOOOOOOO i'm gonna change my mind in a minute... i'm currently torn between Medicine at Midnight and One by One, i might swap their places
I can't even attempt to do this.
on a side note...it's good Spotify now show the playing numbers of every song on albums. Interesting to see how popular each song is on all the Foo albums.
Essential
TINLTL & TCATS.
Superior
IYH acoustic disc, Wasting Light
Good
ESPG (less repetition of certain lyrics and would have been up there)
1x1 (it's the album that got me into them)
Concrete & Gold is a strong record damnit
MatM
Sonic Highways
S/T
Not avoid but just a little disappointing when you hear some of the Bsides from the era. It's proof that they'll never actually go heavy.
IYH "Rock" disc
This won't make sense but here's my jab at it. I don't even understand the Essential/Superior categories.
Essential-The Colour and the Shape
-There is Nothing Left to Lose
Superior-Wasting Light
-S/T
-Medicine at Midnight
-Concrete and Gold
Good-In Your Honor
-One by One
-Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
Avoid-Sonic Highways
Essential
-There is Nothing Left to Lose
-The Colour and the Shape
Superior
-S/T
-One by One
-In Your Honor
-Wasting Light
Good
-Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
-Medicine at Midnight
-Concrete and Gold
Avoid
-Sonic Highways
I know this is only a small response but unsurprisingly everyone puts TCATS in the essential category.
The list in the mag goes:
Essential
-The Colour and the Shape
-S/T
Superior
-TINLTL
-One by One
-Concrete and Gold
-Wasting Light
Good
-Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
-Medicine at Midnight
-In Your Honor
Avoid
-Sonic Highways
Interesting!
For me some albums are very personal and are associated with lots of memories, that's why i'll always hold ESPG (just using it as an example) close to my heart and i find it very difficult to listen to it without the connection and letting it affect the real 'value' (i can't think of a better word right now) and sound of the album
And that's the power of music 🙂
I get that anything like this is personal preference, but the reason i asked was while I'm sure 99% of people would put TCATS in the 'essential', I couldn't be anywhere near as certain as to what people would pick for 'avoid'.
Oh nooo, my response wasn't aimed at you 😅 i was just thinking out loud
It's really difficult to list things like these, let alone Foo Fighters albums to avoid because in my opinion there is no such a thing ☺
Great posts!!
Here is mine:
Essential:
Wasting Light
TCATS
Superior:
TINTL
Sonic Highways
S/T
Medicine At Midnight
Good:
ESPG
ONE X ONE
In Your Honor
Avoid:
Concrete & Gold
Fun challenge!
Essential (2)
Wasting Light
There Is Nothing Left To Lose
Superior (4)
Concrete and Gold
The Colour and the Shape
Medicine at Midnight
Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
Good (3)
In Your Honor
Foo Fighters
One By One
Avoid (1)*
Sonic Highways, even though "Outside" is a top 5 Foo song for me.
I've tried to do this exercise a bunch of times in the last 3 weeks and I'm now writing an email to a probably now defunct email address for Paul Brannigan cause these categories are absolute horseshit.
Superior/Exception are way too close together and the gap between Good and Avoid is too wide (and would probably fit 40% of the catalog)
To be fair to him - those are the categories imposed by the magazine, so it’s the corresponding write-up that has to do the heavy lifting as to where on the spectrum it sits.
https://imgur.com/6Yhe6B7 - here’s the article.
I find the suggested playlist the most questionable bit on the page.
Yeah, I don't know if I dislike any of those songs but Aint it the life, last song, rosemary, concrete and gold, and chasing birds are all in a "really?" level for essential playlist. Like, even if you're not strictly adhering to hits (which is great), it's hard to defend any of those over Walk & These Days.
There’s no excuse to exclude ‘Walk’ on that list
The Last Song being on that list is mind boggling
I like the Last Song, but I'm not sure I'd make any top list for me if it from 2000 onward even.
Hell, I don't even think it was the last song about the person it is about, so it's really a lie too.
It's like asking me to rate my fav children. And YOU are going to rate them based on when you were born...
Some of you knew my first born and were close to the family and watched as s/he grew up. You went to their christenings and you watched as they grew older and had to put up with their different but familiarly similar siblings.
Some of you came to the birth of my sixth, seventh, eighth child... followed them incessantly but still really only know THEIR lives... added to all the photos and comments you see about them and how they fit in with all the earlier offspring.
Those like me that were here at the start are still here because the beginning was just insane.
It grabbed their attention - and for most probably least because of Nirvana as there was a good gap.
So what is essential to me has to be what I cant imagine the FF being without... which is S/T FF, then TCATS.
It cant EVER change. So the poll gets sucky.
What gets me now 26 plus years on from the start is how I hear songs again after a break out of the blue - like in a mix or in airports (one 12 months back for me Intl but bear in mind I'm in wonderland NZ where covid is um just annoying domestic - so one was like a few weeks ago) where deff ones hit me like Generator or Have It All just the other day and I have to stop and listen and go fuck me that's a simply awesome song... that I never ever rated off album at release.
Then add the gigs you went to.... like they cant influence the albums...
So even when you get five FF "super" fans of the same age in one room - they aren't going to give the same result on ANY poll.
So only one album cab get a rating of essential as only one can:
es·sen·tial (ĭ-sĕn′shəl) adj.
1. Constituting or being part of the nature or essence of something; inherent...
Foo Fighters - Eponymous (Foo Fighters)
NONE can ever be rated avoid...
as avoid means don't ever listen to - so how can any person rate the album for themselves if you are telling them not to ever hear it?
And to be clear - that was supporting Tim's post from way out in the left field of my old head.
I'm not sure I'd rank the albums the same way if you asked me to do it like 1-2x a year. It's tough cause I don't really do a super deep dive anymore after I got that year in review from spotify thing that told me i'd listened to damn near 40 hours of foo fighters in the past year.
and that shit didn't even include most of december.
I walk a fair bit as my exercise and use the now very old school iPod Shuffle (the tiny square ones).
They have awesome clarity, volume, durability and the batteries last years. So naturally Apple stopped making or supporting them so people can strap a flat brick to their arms - once they buy the strap, screen protector, case, insurance and xyz apps to play or stream music.
Anyway I have used two for like ten years. One is FF only and gets all the new stuff added. One is everything else - where stuff gets rotated. I just grab what I feel like as I go out the door.
It was mid pandemic I sat down and worked out (when one died) that I'm on the orig of the "all other" units and no 5 of the FF one.
Although i've warmed to streaming and use Spotify a lot, you'll still have to pry my iPod Classic 160GB from my cold dead hands!
Mine died a numbers of years ago 😢
Switched to Google play music as I could back up my entire library and it was on it's own server. Was made to switch to YouTube music. Which has a shit interface but allows me to have my music library at my fingertips