Violet Grohl's Debut Album 'Be Sweet to Me' is a 90s Post-grunge Nostalgic Trip
Photo via Instagram.
Violet Grohl has been teasing her debut album Be Sweet to Me since the beginning of this year. In January, she released her two title tracks “THUM” and “Applefish,” a couple years after her first single “Nausea,” which featured her father Dave Grohl.
The entirety of the record has some serious late 90s, Queens of the Stone Age vibes. “THUM” starts the album with a hard rock guitar sound that mellows out during the verses as Grohl’s soft vocals kick in. The lyrics are up to interpretation but it seems like she’s singing about a person who can’t stop self-sabotaging. At the same time, it’s a melancholy love song. The grainy music video shows Grohl dressed up as a lonely bride picking the petals off a rose and lounging around in a carpeted room with a VCR. The repetitive lyrics “can’t help me/can’t help myself/chew my bitter fingers” is the core of the song, emphasizing Grohl’s anxious repetitive habits that she just can’t break and oddly finds comfort in.
“595”, one of the album’s singles, is more of a tongue-in-cheek, flirtatious love song with the repetitive chorus “I’ll be your 1-900 G-spot baby.” The 1-900 refers to the pay-per-call services that used to be popular for psychic or adult chat hotlines. The innuendo is followed by the mentioning of “595, live on the line,” which can refer to a list of things like the Angel number, the sports car, or– if we wanna be more on the nose for the sake of the song– the adult entertainment channel that was used on satellite TV.
“Moving to grandma’s, moving to grandma’s” Grohl keeps saying on her third track “Bug on the Cake.” The music video reflects this, showing a cigarette-smoking older woman, played by Nina Hartley, dancing around the pool and drinking dirty martinis; Grohl sings into a microphone in the background with a stoic face in each segment. The music video looks like something straight out of the MTV channel. The tracks are all around fun and dancey, but begin to mellow out with the lovesick tracks “Last Day I Loved You” and “Big Memory” as well as one of the only non-rock, ambient songs titled “Mobile Star.”
Grohl picks it back up with Often Others, with melodic vocals over a hard-rock guitar and hard-hitting drums that is similar to the early 2000s Alternative rock/Post-grunge sound. Rock ballad “Applefish” is next, one of my favorite singles of the album, with heavy lyrics like “No past to escape to/greetings from the other side” in the chorus. There is a sense of loneliness as Grohl sings about an “Empty road humming by.” She then sings “Friends across the river/Pull me from the water” but her “Return denied.” The title “Applefish” may refer to the actual Sea Apple fish as there are consistent references to a river, a “siren song” and a shore Grohl is “stranded on” in the verse. Either way, the melancholy lyrics and tone of this song remind me of Jeff Buckley’s haunting, poetic music.
“Cool Buzz” is another memorable track for its fast-paced Foo Fighters tone. Like “Bug on the Cake,” it’s another MTV music video fever dream. The thrashy drums and fast guitar give the song a punk rock vibe. But despite its fun tune, the lyrics have a somewhat dark story about neglect, specifically the neglect of women in conventionally “male” spaces like the punk rock scene. In the pre-chorus, Grohl sings “Shoot my favorite arrow/Through the mind that's narrow” referring to her desire to make others more open-minded (no pun intended). In the black and white music video, Grohl proves this by shooting arrows at the male characters after they mosh around her mockingly.
The album mellows out with “Pool of My Dreams,” an ambient dream-pop song that is similar to the spaciness of “Mobile Star.” The dreamy lyrics feel like a lonely, Sunday afternoon full of reminiscing as Grohl sings “Days keep on falling away/Feels like they're drifting off” in the pre-chorus. The album closes out with “Plastic Couch,” another melancholy tune with an acoustic guitar and soft vocals. The lyrics paint a picture about a “Pretty plastic room” where everything is “Perfectly preserved.” The tidiness of this house “Where milk is never spilled so you can't cry”-- my favorite lyric– disguises the true feelings of Grohl which is “sad and dull.” By the three minute mark, the track turns heavy with the breakdown of drums and a faint electric guitar, making for a cinematic exit of the album.
Overall, the entirety of Violet Grohl’s debut album is a 90s Post-grunge nostalgic trip.
