Disc 1:
01 – In Your Honour
02 – No Way Back
03 – Best Of You
04 – D.O.A.
05 – Hell
06 – The Last Song
07 – Free Me
08 – Resolve
09 – The Deepest Blues Are Black
10 – End Over End
Disc 2:
01 – Still
02 – What If I Do?
03 – Miracle
04 – Another Round
05 – Friend Of A Friend
06 – Over And Out
07 – On The Mend
08 – Virginia Moon
09 – Cold Day In The Sun
10 – Razor
And so it has come to this. After a decade (oh yes, it has been that long) of rock ranging from ‘perfectly acceptable’ to ‘hopelessly addictive’, the Foo Fighters now feel the need to try and prove themselves worthy of their place near the top of the rock food chain. To listen to the way Dave Grohl has been drooling about this album in the pre-release hype, this is a call for the entire world to answer. Answer they inevitably shall, but it helps to understand where Grohl is coming from these days.
You see, despite his good intentions, at times it is easy to picture Grohl as the adult version of a character from That ’70s Show. He was born into a generation of kids raised on a staple rock diet of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Queen, kids that subsequently wanted to do nothing more than RAWK but had sod all to actually say with it. There’s nothing wrong with a pointless bit of RAWK in theory, but even with the best of intentions it inevitably ends badly. You can start off harmlessly enough by “Living On A Prayer” but in the end you just wind up with a Limp Bizkit. Go ahead and RAWK for RAWK’s sake alone, but can’t we just add some roll to the mix for a change? Well, yes, but that can come at a price too. Even if you’re just Automatic For The People you can still turn into a Kid A. Thankfully for Dave and his neighbourhood of RAWK disciples, punk rocked seeped into them just in time for high school and so they all wound up meeting at the halfway point with grunge rock and That Other Band by the time the ’90s rolled around. After they had come and gone, however, Dave was left to his own devices.
So what came next? Well, some straight-ahead RAWK of course. Collaborations with perennial fanboys Tenacious D, blatantly public Led Zep worship and the misguided Probot project couldn’t point to anything more. But what of the collaborations with Nine Inch Nails, Garbage and Queens of the Stone Age? And how could anyone capable of a song like “Everlong”, which continues to hand around Grohl’s neck like a teasing millstone of perfection, not be able of adding some substance to their style? Hell, if Green Day can dupe millions into thinking American Idiot was any sort of novel political protest then why not, right? Well, sure. Especially a fella like Grohl. If you can come through a close friend’s well-documented suicide with a song like “Big Me”… if you can be known as The Drummer and then The Songwriter… if you can make out with Jack Black in a video for your last album and then collaborate with Norah Jones on the next one, then… well, then you’re probably a little confused. It’s all about the duality of Dave this time around, and so here we go with that ol’ rock staple – the double album. The first half is RAWK and damn proud to RAWK. The second half is acoustic and contemplative. Dave Grohl appears to want to sit atop both of his sides and show them off for all the world to see, though they were all too apparent from the outset. Nonetheless, this is the album that is intent on defining the band. Maybe, but a more apt term is ‘covering your bases.’
To be perfectly honest, the first disc is almost completely forgettable. Dave’s deep-rooted desire to cut loose and RAWK is all very well and good but it feels hollower than ever before here, with most of them coming across as tame and as identikit as Bryan Adams’ back catalogue. Songs such as “No Way Back” and “D.O.A.”, with lyrics like “pleased to meet you, say your prayers” and “bet your life there’s something killing you”, come across not as apocalyptic protests but as meaningless filler. These types of song come fast and furious as they should, but they are the soundtrack to a sunny afternoon giving your grandmother a lift to the bingo hall rather than hurtling the car through a pedestrian zone with the intent of taking as many innocent people with you before the car meets that brick wall up ahead. It’s just all too nice to really get into it in any real manner, which is, despite the prominent use of his Metal Voice, the biggest problem Dave faces with this sort of material.
This is not to say that it isn’t any good, however. Though it may seem to be intended as one thing, it still works perfectly well as another, mainly due to the songs working through nothing but sheer force of will. Songs such as “Resolve” are just infectiously catchy, leaving even the most stubborn of feet tapping along without realising it, which is perhaps what the Foo Fighters do best. Nonetheless, the standout moment of the first disc remains the bombastic, thunderous titular album opener, “In Your Honour”, which sits as comfortably with the rest of the tracks as a Tyrannosaurus Rex would in a petting zoo. It is the sweat of the night, the start of the laughter and the flood of the tears all rolled into one primal, feral, instinctive song about the nonsensical and overwhelming effect of passionate love. Dave puts the Metal Voice to marvellous use here, wailing at a mocking night sky that “in your honour, I would die tonight” like a spiritually broken soldier searching the stars in a desperate attempt to get back home to his girl, while the petrifying sounds of a Vietnam battle blur out all other sense and reason… And then, just as it burns itself out, the song comes back for one final, dying scream as all hope is lost. There is nothing cute or catchy about this one. It is never anything less than what it is – honest, direct and deadly. Unfortunately, after that opening, the rest of the disc never really stood a chance.
Fortunately, disc two has a lot more meat on its bones. The Metal Voice is put away for another day and Dave sings as he ought to – naturally and tenderly – on the ‘acoustic’ side of the album that finally shows what the band are capable of making. It opens with the dark tones of “Still”, a song so sinister and brooding it could have been directed by Tim Burton. There is no need to shout and try to force the dark place to come to claim you – as this song shows it is far more effective to just sit and will it on with all the beauty and splendour that self-destruction can bring… There’s not much hope of leaving that dark place even if you wanted to though, for “What If I Do?” comes next, caught between a rock and a hard place and tearing its hair out trying to escape. It is light in tone, heavy in heart and completely scared to death of what might happen to it, wide awake at 3am with a single tear rolling down its cheek, locked out of love by circumstance alone… It’s a definite highlight of the album, reinforced by the more maudlin and middle-aged tracks that come later, such as “Miracle”, “On The Mend” and “Another Round.” They aren’t out-and-out bad; they just work better as background noise than as actual songs.
Of more interest is “Friend Of A Friend”, a cut that feels spiritually connected to Cobain’s darker moments both in tone and content. True, seeking for similarities in the music of Grohl and Cobain is a foolhardy venture, but a line like “he says never mind, and no-one speaks” is really just asking for trouble. Hell, the protagonist of the song is a fragile and emotionally confused guy in need of protection, sitting on his own playing guitar to escape the world… I mean, really. “Over And Out” explores similar territory, acting as an open plea to a friend on the brink of disappearing into the abyss once and for all. But can they be saved if they don’t want to be? There are no easy answers in the dark place, after all, and the song recognises this. The music is sharp and pointed out of both resignation and frustration, simmering into a steady anger at this person’s selfish behaviour… But it just can’t quite bring itself to truly hate… It wants to help, but “I just don’t feel you anymore”…
Quite how such songs are expected to sit beside the likes of “Virginia Moon” and “Cold Day In The Sun” and work is a bit of a mystery… unsurprisingly, they don’t work in terms of creating any semblance of an album theme, but they do work as standalone tracks. The duet with Norah Jones on the former, the exact sort of love song you would expect to hear from Bruce Springsteen if he were born in 1920, should not work whatsoever and yet by thoroughly no-selling irony, it does. The latter, meanwhile, is a slice of Dennis Wilson flavoured pop sung by drummer Taylor Hawkins that bounces and breezes with all the joys of summer. Cutting back to the dark place for album closer “Razor”, complete with lines like “wake up, it’s time, need to find a better place to hide”, is far too jarring for comfort. Perhaps sometimes the dark place is just too prevalent for comfort…
So after all is said and done, is the album actually worthy of the lavish praise heaped upon it by Grohl? Well, not really. As every review under the sun has been saying, there is one classic 10-track album in here somewhere but it has been diluted by filler and a strange to be something it’s not. Releasing a double album and splitting it the way that they have was not a brave decision, it was a rather scared one. The most interesting songs on here are the ones were the band makes an effort to do more than just turn everything up to 11 and RAWK, yet by including an entire CD dedicated to doing just that they’ve left one foot in the grave rather than growing into something far more exciting. Still, they’ve sown some potentially very provocative seeds here… maybe one day, we’ll be fortunate enough to see them come to fruition…
Like This, Love These:
“In Your Honour”, “What If I Do?”, “Virginia Moon”
Like This, Try These:
Pearl Jam – Live At Benaroya Hall, The White Stripes – Get Behind Me Satan, Various – Desert Sessions vol. 9 & 10
