Violet Grohl’s “Be Sweet To Me” Has A Bug In The Cake: Record Review

Violet Grohl’s Be Sweet To Me arrives with the immediate advantage of being called Be Sweet To Me, which sounds less like an album title than a warning issued by a cashier who has just seen what you did to the self-checkout machine.

For anyone keeping track at home, yes, Violet is Dave Grohl’s daughter. This is worth mentioning for about nine seconds before the record kicks open its own little basement door and starts throwing wet shoes at the wall. By the end of the second track, the more useful biographical fact is that she appears to have been raised somewhere between a Breeders chorus, a haunted craft store, and the part of Los Angeles where every couch has a manager.

The official tracklist is neat enough on paper: “THUM,” “595,” “Bug In The Cake,” “Last Day I Loved You,” “Big Memory,” “Mobile Star,” “Often Others,” “Applefish,” “Cool Buzz,” “Pool of My Dreams,” and “Plastic Couch.” On record, it plays like those titles were found on handwritten labels attached to jars in a shed police are still calling “unrelated to the investigation.”

Great stuff.

“THUM” opens with guitars that sound like a vending machine refusing to give back a dollar. Grohl sings, “I put my thumb on the bruise / and the bruise said, ‘Finally,'” which is either a clean little line about inherited pain or proof that the album’s first narrator is a talking welt with unfinished errands in Burbank. The drums enter like someone dropped a toolbox down a dumbwaiter. A lesser artist would sand this down. Grohl lets it scrape the hallway.

“595” is nastier, funnier, and probably illegal in four hotel lobbies. Built around a riff with the posture of a payphone in fishnets, it finds Grohl muttering, “Dial me wrong and I will invoice your mother,” before the chorus snaps into place like a motel door chain. At one point she appears to whisper, “Put a quarter in the mailbox, ask the dial tone who it ate,” which has already ruined landlines for several members of this publication’s senior staff.

Then comes “Bug In The Cake,” the record’s finest public-health incident. The song begins as a birthday-party nightmare and ends as a class-action settlement with frosting. “There is a bug in the cake / and he knows my name / he brought seven lawyers / and one tiny claim,” Grohl sings over a bassline that sounds like it was caught doing something private in a walk-in freezer.

Yikes. Also, yes.

“Last Day I Loved You” and “Big Memory” form the album’s little courtroom section. The former accuses an unnamed dirtbag of “leaving teeth marks on the weather,” while the latter argues that nostalgia should be seized by federal agents and stored in one of those evidence bags with a broken Sharpie. It is all very dramatic, but not in the “please respect my healing journey” way. More in the “someone found a damp diary behind a Guitar Center amp and now the diary is asking for a lawyer” way.

“Mobile Star” is where the record gets properly suspicious. Grohl sings about “a phone with a little crown” and “a girl in the tower eating SIM cards for luck,” and you begin to realize this album is not interested in coming back from the metaphor. Fine. Stay there. Build a small municipal government inside the metaphor. Appoint the bug from the cake as treasurer.

“Often Others” has the dazed, sideways motion of someone carrying a full glass of milk through a family argument. “Applefish” is prettier, which is rude, because it uses that prettiness to smuggle in the line, “I kept your face in a lunchbox / now the lunchbox prays.” That is not normal behavior from a lunchbox, and yet the song makes a strong case that maybe lunchboxes have been spiritually underutilized by American rock.

By “Cool Buzz,” Be Sweet To Me has started to feel less like a debut than a group text among every weird object in a teenage bedroom. A lamp confesses. A sticker pack testifies. A plastic ring from a gumball machine announces it has seen the future and the future is “everyone pretending the kitchen scissors did not go missing for six months.”

Hell yes, unfortunately.

The most powerful, raw moment arrives on “Plastic Couch,” which appears to feature her dad yelling at her to clean her room somewhere deep in the mix. It is not presented like a celebrity cameo. It is presented like an OSHA violation in the hallway. One second Grohl is singing, “Plastic couch, plastic saint, plastic cup full of ants,” and the next a distant dad voice barrels in with the ancient suburban commandment: “Violet, clean your room.” The band keeps playing because art is brave, but also because fathers do not understand overdubs.

That moment explains the whole record better than any press bio could. You can be born close to rock history, possess a voice that can make a chorus sound like it has a fever, and still be subject to the grim household economy of cups, hoodies, chargers, and one chair nobody has seen since March. This is not nepotism. This is laundry with publishing rights.

“Pool of My Dreams” closes things out by drifting face-down through the deep end of the record, humming something about “chlorine saints” and “the lifeguard who sold my shadow on Facebook Marketplace.” It should not work. It works. Then it keeps working until you start wondering whether every good album review should include a quick inspection of the listener’s crawlspace.

Be Sweet To Me is sweet in the way a note taped to your windshield is sweet. Someone took the time. Someone wants you to know exactly what you did. Someone may have placed a bug in the cake, but at least they remembered the forks.

Final score: 8.2/10. Deducting half a point for the municipal cake bug, adding it back because he had representation.