album of the week: 7.3

Foo Fighters

Wasting Light

(2011)

why you'll love it: Hardest rock by Foo Fighters in over a decade

why you'll hate it: incredibly cliched lyrics

It hasn't been a spectacular past ten years for Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl is still the coolest rock star of this generation. The Colour And The Shape (1997) is still a relevant and exciting rock album today, but it's an oldie. To be honest, the Foos haven't delivered a solid album since 1999's There is Nothing Left To Lose. There have been moments of brilliance, but only awash in three albums of underwhelming ballads and radio friendly mediocrity.

If you give a shit about Foo Fighters, you've heard this album by now, and read lots of reviews. Most of them are right on. Wasting Light is indeed return to form in sound and contribution. Original guitarist, Pat Smear, has returned to the band, not as a replacement, but addition. That means three guitars are now part of the Foo powerhouse, and they're put to use here. The first two tracks of Wasting Light are two of the loudest and greatest Foo Fighters songs yet. The rest of the album keeps those sound levels spiked. 2005's In Your Honor had a problem of trying to seem louder than it really was. Grohl would be screaming lyrics from the very first note, even during quiet parts of the songs. The tracks on Wasting Light just aren't loud. They're powerful. Every instrument is operating at full blast.

It feels like Foo Fighters already achieved all their goals a long time ago. The feeling I get from this album is carefree fun. The music videos for "White Limo" and "Walk" are good examples of this. So is their Live @ David Letterman Studio session. All 5 members of this band are good friends. Everything they seem to do now is for fun, and I think that's what developed a carefree style in these songs. "White Limo" is loud and ignorant beyond the point of your typical radio single, yet it was the first fans heard from this album.

Unfortunately, that carefree attitude may have also effected Dave Grohl's effort into the lyrics. Like I said earlier, Dave's one of the coolest guys on the planet, but not even he can get away with some of the crap being said in the middle of this album. I don't even want to repeat some of ... okay, just one... "Fame fame go away, come again some other day." UGH, my god! I can't even type these excerpts without cringing. Some of the lyrics are so bad, it actually makes me skip a couple songs on here; and I'm not even much of a lyrics guy.

Cheese factor aside, this album is a smash. If you can manage to turn your brain off for 45 minutes, this whole album just kills. Easily the most fun and exciting Foo album since Colour And The Shape. It's nice to refer to Foo Fighters as a strong rock band today, without having to depend of the goodwill of their first two albums.