probot
Thee divine metallic inspiration and bloody roots of Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, ex-Nirvana) will now be unleashed upon the world.
Probot is the result of Dave Grohl recording an album's worth of bone-crushing metal at his home studio, then sending individual instrumental tracks to some of his favorite metal vocalists from what was clearly an extremely formative period in Grohl's past (1983-1990) for vocals to be added.
Each song features it's own throat, with lyrics and vocal melodies written by each of thee same vokillist. All collaborators were given absolute freedom to put their own metallic stamp on the compositions. In most cases Grohl didn't hear what was happening to the tracks once they had left his studio, and remembers the return of tapes (with the new vocal additions) as being "like Christmas morning over and over again." Asked about the recording process, Grohl enthusiastically proclaims "It isn't about me - I'm just having the time of my life in a `metal fantasy camp' being able to create something with these people I listened to when I was young."
With the help of Matt Sweeney (Zwan/Chavez), Grohl was able to hunt down most of his favourite singers - covering a lot of metal ground in the process. "There are some fast tracks - the Cronos track (`Centuries Of Sin') is old-school fast thrash metal", Grohl explains. "The Lee Dorrian track (`Ice Cold Man') is slow...with a proper doom-dirge to it, the Snake track (`Dictatorsaurus') is reminiscent of old Voivod, the Mike Dean track (`Access Babylon') is old-school metal-hardcore crossover."
Grohl's songs come off as a perfect match for the vocalist's throat. Although the songs were not intentionally written in this manner, the combination of his instinctive song writing along with possibly the best performance of each singer makes for a definitive result. King Diamond's track (`Sweet Dreams') contains everything you could possibly want from the King: the trademark falsetto highs, haunting melody and ghostly low vibrato, its all represented. The same can be echoed about Lemmy's track (`Shake Your Blood'). A fist pounding rocker with (in addition to the vocals, of course) a special performance from the Icon of Filth himself on bass. The result is a jaw dropping fusion of Dave's hardrock/pop sensibilities and Lemmy's undeniable iconic metal charm.
As with Lemmy's, the Cronos (Venom) and Wino (The Obsessed, Spirit Caravan) tracks also feature instrument-additions from the singers. Cronos adds his trademark bass from hell tone throughout `Centuries of Sin' and Wino adds a blistering, intense lead to `The Emerald Law'. Additionally, Grohl enlisted a few non-vocal contributions including a searing guitar solo by Kim Thayil of Soundgarden on `Sweet Dreams', as well as some punk as fuck squeals by Bubba Dupree from Void on `Access Babylon'.
The first grim taste of Probot was a two-track 7 inch, limited to a single-run of 6,666 copies. Featuring `Centuries Of Sin' with Cronos and `The Emerald Law' with Wino. It was rabidly devoured by a ravenous horde that is now blood-thirsty for more.
This is what the world has been waiting for. This is Probot.