Foo Fighters
In Your Honor
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Foo Fighters
In Your Honor
Roswell/RCA, 2005
RiYL: Weezer, '80s Cheap Trick, Screaming Trees/Mark Lanegan |
Disc one, track one "In Your Honor" is probably the dumbest moment on Dave Grohl's new opus. Over some of the least subtle studio effects ever applied, the Foos unleash their own version of Cheap Trick's "Hello There" (or more accurately, Spinal Tap's "Tonight I'm Going To Rock You Tonight"), a song designed to open concerts and give those always unheralded laser show/smoke machine operators a chance to really strut their stuff.
Through the rest of the first disc, the Foo Fighters demonstrate their usual strengths and weaknesses in equal measure. There's Taylor Hawkins' ongoing clinic on Drumming for the Mulleted. There's that thing on the guitar where you play one note, then the same note two strings up and mute the one in the middle. There's those bits where the drums pull out and both guitars go "scree!" Throughout, the work of bassist Nate "Autopilot" Mendel and the winner of MTV2's "Be the Other Guitarist from the Foo Fighters" contest is inoffensively anonymous.
There are agreeable moments. "The Last Song" shows a dramatic application of 1-1 time ("THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!") and doesn't drop the ball for the obvious chorus. "End Over End" is less murky than a lot of its companions and features the aways preferable Growly Dave instead of Mumbly Dave. "Best of You" is an effective single that sounds eerily like the last five or six effective Foo Fighters singles.
The quieter Disc Two features more howlers (silly Dave, never let the drummer sing! Whatever gave you that idea?) "Friend Of A Friend" is awfully reminiscent of Nirvana's "Something In The Way" (it was written years ago about Kurt Cobain) which is not a place the Foo Fighters want to go. But there are also some real nice tracks, like "Still," which favorably compares to Iron & Wine, and the surprisingly un-hokey "Another Round."
The trouble is when your drummer is the best player in the band, it's going to be difficult to put brushes in his hand for an entire record and hope not to lose your listener completely. Grohl simply doesn't have two discs worth of songs to go around, and much of In Your Honor's back end turns into a guest-star polluted major-label hootenanny. Hey, it's Norah Jones! And John Paul Jones! And that guy from the Wallflowers (No, not that guy, the other one)!
Despite the expansion of budget and lineup, the Foos haven't really evolved since the first three songs of their outstanding eponymous debut, which introduced their three song archetypes: the fast loud one, the slower loud one, and the not loud one. Since then, their albums have been pretty steadily 60% filler.
Since In Your Honor has more songs, it has more good songs, and a canny reshuffling of 12 of them would make the best Foo Fighters album ever. That's not what this record is, however. It's 20 songs, sequenced in an irritating and counterintuitive manner, and destined to go on the shelf unlistened-to with Warehouse: Songs And Stories, Use Your Illusion, and whatever those Nelly records were called.
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.