Nothing From Something (Foo Fighters - Sonic Highways)

Foo Fighters - Sonic Highways

Why you'll love it:  Ambitious concept.  First three songs rock.

Why you'll hate it:  Fails to deliver on concept.  Bland material

Maybe it's a sixth sense, or just paranoia; but when I smell bullshit on something, it's hard for me to look past it.  Pound for pound, Foo Fighters is the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful rock band of the last 20 years.  Dave Grohl is one of the coolest people on the planet.  I loved Nate Mendel in Sunny Day Real Estate.  Chris Shiflett saw No Use For A Name through their peak years.  Taylor Hawkins, Pat Smear... I love all these guys.  They deserve their success, and wear it well.  Hey, at the very least, if Foo Fighters weren't here, you'd have Nickelback and Imagine Dragons representing modern mainstream rock.  What would you prefer?

Despite all that love, Foo Fighters are still part of an artistically tepid, and emotionally sterile mainstream music system; that is all about hype and production.  When Foo Fighters announced their next album was going to be an 8 city Americana tour, written on the go, with guest stars and an HBO documentary crew in tow, I groaned.  It all feels like a big orchestrated "event", with very little substance.

I suppose Sonic Highways turned out to be the best it possibly could have.  It's a mostly bland Foo Fighters album with one, maybe two breakout songs.  They've done it before.  Even on their previous album, Wasting Light (2011), which I was mostly positive about.  But that positivity came from its attitude.  Despite a lot of filler tracks and corny lyrics, Wasting Light felt... honest and fun.  Sonic Highways feels like something written for them by a committee.

Even though I found a good half of this album to be "bad", possibly its biggest disappointment is that it doesn't even live up to its promise.  8 songs, recorded in 8 separate "rock and roll capitals" of America.  These songs are meant to represent the culture in which they were produced in.  This just sounds like every other Foo Fighters album to me.  There is a little bit of "Southern twang" in "Something From Nothing", so surely that must be the New Orleans or Nashville... oh wait, Chicago?  Maybe Foo Fighters taking honest attempts at a bluegrass, motown, or no wave song would be disastrous, but it would be something.  These are just a bunch of songs you can find on any other Foo Fighters album, only with Dave Grohl's diminishing songwriting skills.  At best, he is leaving no impression whatsoever.  At worst, it's cliche after cliche and rhyming for the sake of rhyming  Another disappointment, because that motherfiucker can still scream his ass off.

Sonic Highways is only about 15 minutes of worthwhile content, stretched out to 8 songs.  The whole thing is built from a lofty concept that falls embarrassingly short of the mark.  The Foo's last LP filled me with warm feelings.  This album leaves me with nothing. The songs are empty, and marketed with this "America rocks, right?" concept vague enough to one day end up on some smarmy politician's campaign trail.