Foo Fighters - "Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make-Up Is Running)" (mp3)
In Your Honor aged really well for me, at least one half of it. If it'd been released as two seperate albums, the louder first disc probably would've made my top 10 that year, but the quieter second disc was so dull that it dragged down my overall impression of the album. "No Way Out" and "The Deepest Blues Are Black" consistently stayed at or near the top of my most played list on iTunes for a solid year or two. So I was pretty primed for a new Foo Fighters album that was as balls-to-the-wall hard rock as the first disc of In Your Honor, or at least one without a large amount of acoustic material. In general, I thought maybe this year Foo Fighters would start getting a little more respect, although I was proven wrong by Pitchfork shitting on a reissue of the band's best album (and they always overrate reissues), and the general critical reception to "The Pretender," which as far as I'm concerned is already one of their top 5 singles (somehow incredibly derivative of "All My Life" while at the same time way better than it).
If the title wasn't a dead giveaway, though, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace is not a balls-to-the-wall rock record. Dave Grohl's advance press soundbyte about how "it has always been my dream to mix Steely Dan with No Means No" got me a little excited for the soft rock element of it, although the only song on here that I can even halfway picture the Dan playing is "Statues." Mostly, the more restrained parts are in the standard alt-rock quiet/LOUD/quiet/LOUD mold, which sometimes works to great effect, particularly on "Come Alive" and "But, Honestly." It's a good structure, but it gets a bit old, and I prefer In Your Honor's approach of songs that were kind of pretty and midtempo while still being completely over the top and loud.
The problem here, really, is the relative dearth of drums. Even though Grohl doesn't play drums on the Foos' albums anymore, he did pick a great drummer for the band. And I feel like he writes songs with drums in mind, more than the overwhelming majority of rock songwriters, which I really appreciate. So I tune into a Foo Fighters album expecting DRUMS, and lots of 'em. On Echoes, 3 of the 12 songs feature no drums at all, almost half of the tracks start with no drums for the first verse or two, and there's only really a handful of songs that have drumming in every measure of the song and no brief quiet parts like "The Pretender" does. One of them, "Summer's End," is pretty nice, and evokes a place and time (September in Virginia) that I can identify with and reminisce over, but it's still one of the slower songs. Predictably, the fastest of the drum-filled tunes, "Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make-Up Is Running)" is one of my favorites, and practically the only song that has the kind of uptempo swagger of early singles like "Monkey Wrench." The title's been perceived as a potshot at guyliner emo bands, but it doesn't really seem to be about that. But I'm gonna be mad if it's not a single at some point.
In Your Honor aged really well for me, at least one half of it. If it'd been released as two seperate albums, the louder first disc probably would've made my top 10 that year, but the quieter second disc was so dull that it dragged down my overall impression of the album. "No Way Out" and "The Deepest Blues Are Black" consistently stayed at or near the top of my most played list on iTunes for a solid year or two. So I was pretty primed for a new Foo Fighters album that was as balls-to-the-wall hard rock as the first disc of In Your Honor, or at least one without a large amount of acoustic material. In general, I thought maybe this year Foo Fighters would start getting a little more respect, although I was proven wrong by Pitchfork shitting on a reissue of the band's best album (and they always overrate reissues), and the general critical reception to "The Pretender," which as far as I'm concerned is already one of their top 5 singles (somehow incredibly derivative of "All My Life" while at the same time way better than it).
If the title wasn't a dead giveaway, though, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace is not a balls-to-the-wall rock record. Dave Grohl's advance press soundbyte about how "it has always been my dream to mix Steely Dan with No Means No" got me a little excited for the soft rock element of it, although the only song on here that I can even halfway picture the Dan playing is "Statues." Mostly, the more restrained parts are in the standard alt-rock quiet/LOUD/quiet/LOUD mold, which sometimes works to great effect, particularly on "Come Alive" and "But, Honestly." It's a good structure, but it gets a bit old, and I prefer In Your Honor's approach of songs that were kind of pretty and midtempo while still being completely over the top and loud.
The problem here, really, is the relative dearth of drums. Even though Grohl doesn't play drums on the Foos' albums anymore, he did pick a great drummer for the band. And I feel like he writes songs with drums in mind, more than the overwhelming majority of rock songwriters, which I really appreciate. So I tune into a Foo Fighters album expecting DRUMS, and lots of 'em. On Echoes, 3 of the 12 songs feature no drums at all, almost half of the tracks start with no drums for the first verse or two, and there's only really a handful of songs that have drumming in every measure of the song and no brief quiet parts like "The Pretender" does. One of them, "Summer's End," is pretty nice, and evokes a place and time (September in Virginia) that I can identify with and reminisce over, but it's still one of the slower songs. Predictably, the fastest of the drum-filled tunes, "Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make-Up Is Running)" is one of my favorites, and practically the only song that has the kind of uptempo swagger of early singles like "Monkey Wrench." The title's been perceived as a potshot at guyliner emo bands, but it doesn't really seem to be about that. But I'm gonna be mad if it's not a single at some point.
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on Saturday, October 06, 2007 at 12:22 PM.
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Mr. Emily : 1:52 AM