Foo Fighters unveil online radio console: Hear new song snippets -- and Dave Grohl covering Dishwalla

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The slow and tease-heavy rollout of the new Foo Fighters album continues, as the band quietly unveiled an interactive radio tuner on its site Wednesday night. Looking like something ripped from the dashboard of an ’80 Camaro, a car that would, admittedly, likely be the perfect top-down setting to experience the maxed-out crunch of some of the latest Foo Fighters riffs -- at least the brief snippets that have been made available thus far.

One of the songs appearing here has cropped up before, and the name being tossed around is ‘Bridge Burning.’ It’s the most enticing of the two new song samples, with its stop-and-start motif and cold guitar clangor that could have come from a Queens of the Stone Age album. A live take of the band’s 2002 hit ‘All My Life’ plays in full on one station, perhaps implying the band’s April 2011 album will be a return to earlier, straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll.

There’s some other nonmusic snippets, like the hint that the Foo Fighters will be playing ‘a classic rock’ festival (Note: Grohl didn’t mean ‘classic’ as in Steve Miller Band, but ‘classic’ as in well-known -- hopefully). Also, there’s some chatter toward the end of the dial about a ‘secret show,’ which is something they’ve been known to do recently.

There’s also one Muzak-like station with some vacuuming in the background. Perhaps an album interlude, or perhaps some of that Grohl humor. But hey, Grohl deserves props for poking fun at his band’s status as aging alt-rockers, as well as the stations that continue to cater to them. ‘The best in new alternative rock,’ Grohl-as-mock-DJ says after singing a snippet of Dishwalla and introducing Deep Blue Something. But it’s fitting here, as the new Foo Fighter moments, as brief as they are, already seem comfortably familiar.

-- Todd Martens