The Foo Fighters Help 2011 in Its Effort to Sound as Much Like the 1990s as Possible

Off the top of my head, I can think of two musical performers for whom I have high hopes, despite the fact that they have disappointed me a lot over the last few years. The first is Elvis Costello, who almost had me at Momofuku and then lost me again at Secret, Profane, and Sugarcane. I have been told that last year’s National Ransom is good, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. The other performer is Dave Grohl, whose music has been the happy soundtrack to quite a bit of my life – as Nirvana’s drummer, as the Foo Fighters’ singer, and with his contribution to the Queens of the Stone Age album Songs for the Deaf. But since about 2005, with the release In Your Honor, I’ve been on a bit of a break from Grohl’s music.

Last year, Grohl played with Them Crooked Vultures (featuring his buddies John Paul Jones and Josh “Rhymes with Tommy” Homme) at Coachella. I tried really hard to like their album, but they forgot to write songs for it so I couldn’t quite pull that off. It was great to hear Grohl play live, though, and it reminded me that the dude is 1) an incredibly talented musician and 2) a seemingly likable guy (I say “seemingly” because I’ve never met the man, but every time I see or read an interview with him, he strikes me as a person of good humor and dignity).

So though my expectations are low for Wasting Light, Grohl’s new album with the Foo Fighters, I have to admit I almost desperately want to like it. The last really great Foo Fighters record, for me, was 1997′s The Colour and the Shape. Yes, it was an arena rock record (or what I like to call a Big Rock Record), but it showed off Grohl’s ability to write catchy pop songs and then dress them up like alternative rock radio hits. And the video for “Everlong” was rad as hell.

If you’ve felt the same way I have about the last few Foo Fighters albums, you might view Wasting Light as an almost shameless attempt to reestablish some manner of credibility – the album is produced by Butch Vig, it features guest appearances by Krist Novoselic (he was in one of the dead-end bands that Grohl played in before hitting the big time with the Foo Fighters) and Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould, and the packaging boasts that it was recorded directly to analog tape in Dave Grohl’s garage. For skeptics, the albums also comes with your very own slice of the master tape, tucked neatly into the booklet. Given my sunny disposition toward Mr. Grohl, I’m inclined to see these touches as signals of his earnest desire to return to making simple, primal rock music (and then destroy the masters!). In Your Honor and the one after it (the one with the long, stupid title) were definitely bloated from a production standpoint and the songs I heard were structurally similar to their 1990s stuff but without the same organic energy. So I’m going to give the Foo Fighters the benefit of the doubt on this one. Perhaps such a calculated shift to an “as live as possible” sound really helped them to get excited about making Wasting Light, which is the most energetic Foo Fighters release I’ve heard in years.

As I’ve said, Grohl used to be able to pen one helluva catchy chorus (even on the screamier songs like “Wind Up”), and he’s mostly found his way back to that on the new record. “Rope,” “Arlandria,” and “Back and Forth” are all pretty infectious and yet still radio-friendly in the way that songs like “Everlong” and “Monkeywrench” were. Though Grohl has boasted that no acoustic guitars were even seen around his garage during the recording of Wasting Light, it still has its ballady moments, including “These Days” and “I Should Have Known,” the latter of which will probably be assumed by lots of people to be about Kurt Cobain. I’m not going to assume that it is, because I feel really weird speculating about people’s feelings when they’ve lost a friend to suicide.

Maybe it’s a product of low expectations, but I quite enjoy Wasting Light. It’s the first Foo Fighters album since The Colour and the Shape (was that really 14 years ago? Sweet Zombie Jesus, it was) that I’ve wanted to listen to more than once. Sure, it can sound a little Queens of the Stone Age-y at times (especially on “Bridge Burning”), but that’s not really a bad thing. Grohl’s aesthetic is a little more poppy than Josh Homme’s and your enjoyment of Wasting Light might hinge on how much you think that’s a good thing. Foo Fighters fans who have found themselves either half-heartedly defending or ignoring (as I have) their last few records should be quite happy with it. It would be easy to say that Wasting Light is the Foo Fighters’ Accelerate, but that’s understating things a bit. Wasting Light, though not flawless, is better than Accelerate overall.

Grohl has made much in interviews about the unique sound you can get recording straight to tape, and he’s right. But that sound might be partly responsible for the fact that Wasting Light is a little light in terms of sonic diversity. That’s slightly offset by the violin and accordion parts on “I Should Have Known,” but basically, you can divide the album into Heavy Guitar Rock songs (“Bridge Burning,” “Rope,” and “White Limo”), Guitar Pop Rock songs (“Back and Forth” and “Walk”) and Patented Foo Fighters Power Ballads (“These Days” and “I Should Have Known”) and pick your favorites.

I find it kind of interesting that Dave Grohl starts Wasting Light screaming “These are my famous last words” and ends it on “Walk” by screaming “I never wanna die.” In fact, the now firmly middle-aged Grohl ponders death quite a bit on the album, telling “Dear Rosemary” that “youth ain’t gonna change the way you die.” I think it’s probably natural to take stock of things when you hit your forties (ask me again when I get there), because that’s a decade where you’re not young anymore but you’re certainly not old. That the Foo Fighters are still able to rock out in a satisfying way – and sound like they really enjoy doing it – at this point in their careers is, by my reckoning, pretty fucking awesome.

I didn’t really have an album in mind that I specifically hoped the Foo Fighters would make; I just knew I didn’t want to hear something like “Pretender” or “Best of You” ever again. Wasting Light’s worst songs beat those two clunkers by a damn sight and if it’s a little radio-friendly, so what? Nirvana was radio-friendly at one time, too. It doesn’t mean the music is bad. It means that, even with all the stupidity driving commercial rock radio these days, stations that usually bombard you with shit like Nickelback, Creed, and Papa Roach can occasionally slip up and play something listenable.

The Little Honey EP

It’s interesting to note that Elvis Costello has now done two duets with Lucinda Williams (first on “There’s a Story” on his Delivery Man album and now “Jailhouse Tears” on her new Little Honey album) because the two artists have exhibited similar behavioral patterns over the last few years – namely, releasing some of their best and worst work, sometimes within a single album.

Anyone who heard West, Lucinda’s last album, was wise to just throw it out after the cringe-inducing “Come On” (the song is a dis to some ex-lover and rather than simply stating, “You couldn’t even make me come”, Ms. Williams tried to make it all cute and punny. Given the strength of her voice and songwriting, it should’ve been easy for her to be so boldly graphic, but what can you do? The song took the whole album down with it) and then you were probably stuffed up with trepidation upon the release of Little Honey. Well, like Elvis Costello’s most recent offering (Momofuku), Little Honey has both reasons to be encouraged and reasons to shake your head in disapproval.

The album starts off nothing short of awesome. The first 8 tracks of the album are really great, some of Williams’ finest work to date, not overwrought or given to her any of her worst excesses. And that’s when you get to “Knowing,” which starts off a long, steep plummet into the meandering, overlong stuff that sunk West. Literally every song after “Jailhouse Tears” is a stinker, especially the ill-advised (and slowed down! Why the fuck would you slow down a cover of an AC/DC song?) finale: a cover of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top”.

But there’s kind of encouraging news here: you can just pretend the album ends with “Jailhouse Tears,” making Little Honey an 8-song EP instead of the bloated 13 track half-monstrosity it is.  In which case, Little Honey is transformed from a mostly good album brought down to mediocrity by its last 5 songs into one of the best EPs of the year and a real return to form for Lucinda Williams. Well done!

“I’ve found the love I’ve been looking for,” she sings on EP-opener “Real Love.” And she found it “standing behind an electric guitar.” Now, anyone who has ever held an electric guitar and played one (assuming it was of any quality at all) knows exactly what she’s talking about here.  “Real Love” incorporates Lucinda Williams’ tendency to see no line separating country and rock, which is why her best stuff sounds a lot like early Rolling Stones stuff.  And, much like the Stones themselves, Williams would perhaps be best served by making sure she starts off every day listening to Exile on Main Street and then saying, “Oh yeah. I should sound like that.”

You can’t blame Lucinda Williams (or Elvis Costello for that matter) for wanting to expand her sound and try new sonic experiments but you also shouldn’t have to pay for the experiments when they go horribly awry. Perhaps the answer is for Williams and Costello to team up and just record an album together. They could check and balance one another into producing something of enormous quality. Or… they could enable each other into producing one of the most unlistenable pieces of shit in modern history (second only to whatever the Dandy Warhols do next).

It’s always more frustrating when an artist who has blown your fucking mind in the past produces embarrassingly crappy work. For example, when Fall Out Boy produces a shitty album (and they’ve produced nothing but shitty albums), I don’t sweat it. That’s a band that has never done anything but making infuriatingly awful music. But Lucinda Williams made Carwheels on a Gravel Road. That’s one of the best albums of the last twenty years. So when she makes stuff like West and the back end of Little Honey, it’s way worse than knowing that Fall Out Boy is going to release another album soon. I expect them to suck and I expect Lucinda Williams to rock. She still mostly does, especially if you ignore everything on Little Honey after “Jailhouse Tears.”