Even more enjoyable and even less memorable than There Is Nothing Left to Lose is the super-slick One By One (2002). The Foo Fighters had by this point become one of the most well-oiled rock machines on the planet and neither the songs nor the production could be any shinier than they are on One By One. The result is that, in the listening to it, the album is a great, propulsive, soft-metal workout, churning and grinding away with Grohl's stylised melodies weaving through it all. But here's the rub, it's all completely forgettable, and it's the funny thing about the way that Grohl writes songs, it's all about the moment, because once the moment's over you wonder whether it really happened. This stuff won't stick even though it sounds great and while that's fine for the experience of a rock record, it may also explain the band's phenomenal success - with every new release there's the hope that this one will be the one. It never is, it's the same as the last one, but there's comfort even in that I guess, so they can't lose. Anyway, whatever, One By One has got 'Halo' and 'Overdrive' and a bunch of other great songs that drift into the ether immediately.
After the split of the almighty Slint the various members spent a while tinkering with other projects, but in my opinion it was Brian McMahon who came up with the most interesting. The For Carnation records are as awkward and impenetrable as the band's name, but they are a few of the most intriguingly creepy ever recorded. The first mini-LP, Marshmallows (1996) is the most eclectic, moving from short stripped back avant-rock numbers to lengthy mood setting experiments in rhythmic repetition, and there's little that unifies them particularly. It's all fine stuff though, starting with the delicate lullaby of 'On the Swing' (which shares the DNA of every Tortoise tune), with McMahon's oddly sinister sung-spoken delivery (odd because there's nothing immediately creepy about his voice at all, but when combined with what's going on around him, it just becomes peculiarly discomforting). The urgent, fuzzy 'I Wear the Gold' sounds like running away from an unknown danger, 'Winter Lair' sets out the blueprint for the full-length album to follow- hushed, sepulchral and deeply sinister, McMahon's lyrics worryingly inaudible, and the mini-LP is all rounded out by the most Slint-like piece on the record, the hypnotic, loping, limping instrumental 'Preparing to Receive You'. Although disjointed, it's a very fine record, exploring parts of rock music that had been little charted before.
But all of the promise of Marshmallows is made good, and in spades, with the deeply creepy eponymous album, released in 2000. The whole album sounds like the worst part of your psyche rising up through swampy mire, like Martin Sheen appearing from the misty slime to kill Kurtz in Apocolypse Now. Brushed drums, a glacial pace, a deadened Farfisa drone and a bassline that sounds like a zombie dragging its feet are the basis of opener 'Emp. Man's Blues', with McMahon's intoned, impressionistic lyrics, the words seemingly skimmed from the surface of a barely contained psychotic's mind ("I am the new Gods, you've seen my face around the block, but now I'm here, my time has come"), delivered in a spoken murmur. See, the thing about the For Carnation album is that it makes you think of pretentious gobbledegook like that. It's fabulous, massively spooked-out, creeping, crawling stuff. It's the sound of a bad night alone on streets you aren't familiar with, and it's one of the greatest mood albums ever made. Second song, 'A Tribute To' seems to be about a man who's done something terrible ("two bullets and a photo of home, damn them that brought me here") and its propulsive driving bassline does nothing to dispel the sense of terrifying unease, which is only magnified by instrumental 'Being Held''s looped distant clanging bells and drones which are broken up halfway through by the introduction of a thudding drum line. Musically there's little of Slint beyond the repetition and McMahon's vocal delivery. There's none of the quiet-LOUD dynamic, it's all quiet, unnervingly so, and the fact that it doesn't release at any point merely adds to its eerie tension. Anyway, the second side is more of the same, but I've talked enough about it now. Suffice it to say that it's superb. I could, however, be completely wrong about the mood though, because my colleague Aswiny just came in and said "this sounds nice".
OK, let's all take a very deep breath before we take a dive head-first into the cesspool - it's five albums by Foreigner. Punk may have been in full swing, but most of the world couldn't care less because there was some soft rock instead. If it's open-top-cars-and-girls-in-T-shirts FM rock you're after, Foreigner are the right place. I've never heard any of Foreigner's albums in their entirety before today (I may have taken the 5 album box set from work, but I don't think I ever had any real intention of actually unwrapping it). And what's most interesting about the eponymous debut album (released in 1977) is how exactly it corresponded to my expectations of it. Overblown, hideously overproduced, absurd and hugely annoying was what I had in mind and so it is. We all know about Lou Gramm's having-trouble-taking-a-dump rock voice and Mick Jones' hard rock solo by numbers guitar work, but what I had also anticipated was how utterly anaemic these "rock anthems" are. Every one of them is a template for how to be tedious and naff. The naff element really is primarily down to the ghastly keyboard work (it's not worth mentioning the lyrics because of course they're laughable, that's a given). Where to start with the songs? Well, I guess the opening minute or so of big hit 'Feels Like the First Time' is surprisingly rocking, but as soon as we get to the disastrous keyboard led middle eight it's all over. It's followed by one of the band's biggest numbers, 'Cold as Ice' which, despite the success of post-irony, is a pile shit, just like everything else here from bizarre declaration of rockdependence 'At War with the World' to idiotic rocker 'Headknocker' to the utterly laughable space-rock of 'Starrider'. Honestly it's terrible. Bearing in mind how much big rock was around by 1977 it's absolutely mystifying to me why Foreigner were so successful.
You know when you're a big rock star but not a total creep and want to treat the female fans with respect? Well, that's not Lou Gramm's way: "I want to know what you're up to after the show". Charming. That pretty much sets the tone for the lyrically creepy 'Hot Blooded' and indeed the whole of second album 'Double Vision' (1978). Beyond the vacuous, misogynistic hard rock of 'Hot Blooded' and 'Love Has Taken It's Toll', you've also got some utterly ghastly rock ballads (the kind of stuff that would even make Extreme weep in pain) like dismal 'You're All I Am' which sounds like Adam & Joe doing a Take That piss-take. There's even a bit of keyboard proggery entitled 'Tramontane' which sounds like it came from the soundtrack of Phantom of the Paradise (actually, that makes it sound a million times better than it actually is). Really, Double Vision is an exercise in showcasing the worst possible elements of the male rock world of the late 70's, and while a lot of FM rock was great both genuinely and in an ironic way, Double Vision, like the rest of Foreigner's work, is just garbage.
And so to finish the day (but sadly not Foreigner) we come to third album, Head Games (1979). Now, I'm not really prepared to say much about Head Games mainly because, at the risk of sounding like a square, I find the cover so unspeakably offensive that I can scarcely be bothered to be offended by the rubbish songs. For those who don't know, and you will from the image below anyway, Head Games' cover is one of the handful of blisteringly women-hating album covers that inspired Spinal Tap's Smell the Glove and the "new Duke Flame" album, depicting as it does a young woman in tight clothes looking frightened and cowering at the back of a men's toilet. Well, what do we infer from that, class? In the end the most important lesson I guess is that the late 70's, particularly in the US, were an unutterably horrible time, in which some of the most repugnant attitudes known to human history were normalised as simple right-thinking. No wonder the insanely derided concept of political correctness came about, what else can you do in the face of such moral disengagement than become a bit po-faced? In any event, Head Games is another 40 minutes of musical excrement.
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