As this blog’s unofficial grunge rock correspondent, I have Internet filters in place to catch for news related to the dinosaurs of that otherwise dormant subgenre. So when my tricked-out Commodore 64 started billowing black smoke, I knew that something big was happening in the world of flannel metal–well, big to the sense of old, weepy, nostalgic farts like me. So what caused this mechanical meltdown of FAIL-like proportions? Was it news that Butch Vig (producer of Nirvana’s Nevermind) would be producing the new Foo Fighters record? Hardly. As it turns out, Dave Grohl’s accompanying boast that this would be the Foos’ “heaviest album yet” overloaded my computer’s custom-made Bullshit Detector. I mean, c’mon!

While I contend that Foo Fighters’ self-titled debut remains one of the most underrated post-hardcore albums of the 1990s, following 1997′s The Color And The Shape that project’s sound has largely degenerated into painfully palatable radio rock, with the current ratio of awesome songs to boring songs hovering around a scientifically-proven, less-than-respectable 1:12. The new songs debuted on last year’s Greatest Hits had the punch of a Shirley Temple. True, the Foos never were all that heavy to begin with, but that only makes Grohl’s claim even more preposterous. After Them Crooked Vultures bored me to tears with their glorified geriatric rock B-sides, I’d go so far as to question whether the former drummer of Nirvana and Scream can even remember what heavy is! Also, dude made the claim from the INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARDS, “swigging from a bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey,” while adding:

If I stay another minute, I’m gonna get so fucking drunk, I’ll barf all over myself.

Sure, some might cite his Probot project as proof of Grohl’s “heavy” bonafides, but until I hear the first single from this as-yet unnamed seventh Foo Fighters LP, I’m chalking this one up to drunken puffery. In the meantime, does anyone know where I can get a replacement C64 motherboard? This one is totally charred.

-GS