Foo Fighters "Wasting Light"

Music review: Foo Fighters Move Forward with Wasting Light

By The Burg Staff on Apr. 13, 2011
By Matt Ashare
Is it finally time to stop referring to Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl as that guy who played drums in Nirvana? Sure, his powerhouse backbeats were integral to the explosive drive of 1991’s landmark Nevermind — you might say, Grohl put the hard in Kurt Cobain’s rock.
But that was 20 years ago. And it’s not like he’s been even the least bit idle since Cobain’s 1994 suicide: The Foos emerged as a fully-formed modern-rock entity in the spring of ‘95 and, with the release of Wasting Light this week, they’ve now got seven studio albums to their credit. Indeed, given the number of lineup changes the Foos have endured, they’ve shown a remarkable consistency, artistically and commercially, over the past decade and a half. (Unless you count the acoustic side of 2005’s 2-CD In Your Honor as some kind of major deviation, which I don’t.)
     And in his spare time, Grohl has found time to team up with guitarist Josh Homme, returning to the drums for Queens of the Stone Age’s metal epic “Songs for the Deaf” in 2001 and then partnering with Homme and former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones as Them Crooked Vultures. (The super-trio’s self-titled debut came out in 2009 and they’ve reportedly got another one on the way.)
     Wasting Light is already being hailed by some — Rolling Stone comes to mind — as the best FF disc since The Colour and the Shape (1997), and it very well might be. But it’s definitely not simply a return to the form of that disc — to the tightly wound pop-punk of “Monkey Wrench” or the brooding power-balladry of “My Hero.” That much is apparent from the muscular guitar riff that introduces the disc’s first single, “Rope”: It certainly owes more to the retro-alloys Homme mines in Queens of the Stone Age than anything Grohl’s done on his own before, and probably more still to the “Black Dog” wizardry of John Paul Jones. There’s even a drum solo refrain leading into an heroic guitar solo that’s just so early-’70s arena rawk, if you know what I mean.
     Grohl hasn’t completely gone over to the dark side. No, he’s simply put together what stands as the Foos’ most musically ambitious album to date, an amalgam of grunge, punk, metal and power-pop that’s never too fractious. “Rope,” for example, wouldn’t be a single if it weren’t for its sugary — yet never quite syrupy — chorus, which builds to a nice melodic climax before those serrated guitars return.
     Unrequited love mixes with ambivalence, bitterness even, in “Dear Rosemary,” a kiss-off of sorts bolstered by a wall of anthemic guitars and the kind of clever-enough refrain (“Truth ain’t gonna change the way lie/Youth ain’t gonna change the way you die”) that’s been Grohl’s stock-in-trade since the first FF disc.  But “White Limo,” with its screamed vocals and dark, churning guitars is twisted metal through and through. It really wouldn’t seem out of place on one of Homme’s Queens discs.
     And, yet, the ghosts of Nirvanas past can’t help but haunt Wasting Light. Not only did Grohl bring Butch Vig, the engineer who helped mastermind the alt-rock breakthrough of Nevermind, back to produce the disc, but Nirvana adjunct guitarist (and former Foo Fighter) Pat Smear has rejoined the band. As if that weren’t enough to make the connection, that’s Kirst Novoselic’s anchoring the angst of the wistful “I Should Have Known,” which rises to a screaming crescendo with Grohl repeating the pained, “No, I cannot forgive you yet…” He may be talking about Kurt, but I kinda doubt it. . .
Ashare is a freelance writer based in Lynchburg and former music editor for The Boston Phoenix.