Few records come out with the level of anticipation that has surrounded Sonic Highways, the latest from certified arena rock gods Foo Fighters. For what may go down as one of the most famous “concept” albums in music history, frontman Dave Grohl and co did what they do best and hit the road.
Having been equally inspired by his toils inside Los Angeles’ Sound City Studios (After The Gold Rush, Fleetwood Mac, Nevermind) and the process of making a documentary about the historic recording studio, Grohl decided to make lightning strike twice… and then seven more times.
Recorded in famous studios across eight US cities — Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. — in tandem with a documentary series chronicling the production of the album, Sonic Highways is Foo Fighters’ most ambitious project to date.
Shit
Let’s get this out of the way quick: I have not seen the album’s accompanying HBO documentary series. Assuming the series, also titled Sonic Highways, is the accompaniment? Perhaps the two work in some sort of avant-garde symbiosis like a far less risky version of Björk’s Biophilia?
It’s hard to tell, and therein lies the first bottleneck that listeners will inevitably hit with the latest Foos dispatch: do you have to watch the series in order to “get” the album? If you haven’t, is the album worse, better, or the same?
For example, during a stray clip, Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen, who made a sterling appearance on the soundtrack to Grohl’s Sound City project, asks the band if they really need a fourth guitar on ‘Something from Nothing’, the album’s Dio-aping, awkwardly funky lead single.
The truth is, no, the song did not need another guitar heavyweight piled on top of the three the band already possesses, but without Nielsen’s superfluous contribution, the very idea of Sonic Highways becomes expendable.
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That said, serious points must be awarded for effort and sheer commitment. While it’s easy to view Sonic Highways as a self-indulgent project of limited creative value, bankrolled by Grohl’s rockstar salary — and it is — Grohl has done a good job of making fans believe in the Sonic Highways ideal as much as he does.
In that sense, it’s not unlike when he managed to convince people that Wasting Light was the band’s return to its garage days, despite sounding an awful lot like it was recorded using a multi-million dollar studio that just happened to be housed inside of a garage.
Writing for DIY, reviewer Sarah Jamieson posed one of the album’s central considerations: “How does a band manage to make an album that channels rock, funk, the blues, hardcore, country, hip hop, go-go and punk all while still making a record that sounds like their own?”
Our answer is they didn’t, and while that could be considered another criticism of the album, it’s to the band’s credit that they managed to maintain their identity throughout the entire, likely laborious, recording process. That very process yielded an album that still sounds like a Foo Fighters record in spite of itself.
Shit
Confusion is not the only issue inherent to the Sonic Highways concept. The whole thing is actually pretty shaky, and when it’s not threatening to collapse under its own bloated weight, it’s downright starchy, ironically enough.
For those playing catch-up, in addition to visiting eight legendary studios around the US, Grohl also invited musical representatives from each city to contribute to the album, as well as incorporating excerpts from his conversations with each city’s artists into the lyrics of the album, which he wrote just minutes before he was set to record them, in the hopes that he would be freshly inspired.
If you were ever skeptical during the lead-up to Sonic Highways, your sentiments were well-founded. Whereas a band like Mastodon use their might to bend album concepts to their own will (to be fair, none were as ambitious as Sonic Highways), Grohl and co seem suffocatingly insulated by their self-imposed mandate.
Did Grohl absolutely have to wait till the last second to write lyrics? No. Did each song need guests? No. Did there need to be one extra-long track representing each city? No. But that’s how Grohl chose to do it, and the album suffers as a result.
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His words may not always be accurate, but they’re consistently honest. Grohl was right when he said the band’s then-upcoming eighth album would not see them turn into Radiohead. “I thought, ‘Fuck that.’ …[We just started] banging out these big choruses, because that’s what we do.”
“We’re banging them out in the middle of instrumental sections that will take you by surprise. The music is a progression or an evolution, for sure, but it’s a Foo Fighters record.” An “evolution”? Hardly. But a “Foo Fighters record”? Absolutely. And if that’s what you were hoping for, Sonic Highways won’t prove a challenging listen.
Any progression seems to be confined to Grohl’s lyrics, which focus less on get-through-this reaffirmations and hard-rocking hate-you-love-you tales (to varying efficacy). The music is as consistent as ever. Credit here must also be given to the band’s longtime collaborator Butch Vig, who dutifully polishes every sound and tone that appears on the album, ensuring everything falls in line.
Everything, from the power pop of ‘What Did I Do?/God As My Witness’, to the insistent punk rock of ‘The Feast and The Famine’ is textbook Foo Fighters, with the guest contributions, in this case provided by Gary Clark, Jr and Bad Brains respectively, never quite managing to warp the rigid frame of the stadium rock giants.
Verdict: Shit
Not unlike a post-Roth Van Halen, Foo Fighters’ latest record is a letdown as a result of the band who once understood where their strengths lie abandoning them in favour of lofty aspirations of placing themselves in the greater rock and roll canon.
Not only is this completely unnecessary for one of the 21st Century’s few remaining arena rock bands, but it takes what made the band so enjoyable — the unabashed sentimentality and honesty of ‘Everlong’ and ‘Next Year’, the unkempt aggression of ‘The Pretender’ and ‘The One’, and the urgent garage horsepower of ‘All My Life’ and ‘My Hero’ — and replaces it with, well, a concept.
Sonic Highways is out now via RCA/Sony
