Foo Fighters – Wasting Light
Album Seven, 16 years in, the Foo Fighters are facing the same quandary that any band of a certain age has : does the world need a seventh album? What new are you saying that you weren’t doing before? Why is this different?
And the answer is, it isn’t. Wasting Light isn’t the best Foo Fighters album : from the limp title and vague artwork, to the fact that it is a set of eleven solid, but not exceptional rock songs, it’s exactly the type of mid-career album that indicates maybe that this is just after the rot set in. Which is unfair. It’s a good record : strong, solid, melodic, chock full of guitars, crunchy choruses, but also the same kind of songs that have been on Foo Fighters records for ten years or more.
‘Bridges Burning’ promises much : a rampaging set of ascending riffs, a screamed intro, before WHAM…. straight into a plodding Pixies -style verse/chorus/verse of quiet/LOUD/quiet. Aside from a 1995-era Faith-No-More song in the shape of ‘White Limo’, the rest of the album is solid, but forgettable. Which is disappointing. ‘I Should Have Known’ is the same kind of semi/ballad that was on the acoustic branch of ‘In Your Honor’, and overall there’s no great invention or progression here. It’s exactly the same kind of stuff this band have been doing for over a decade. Not that in itself, that isn’t worthy and exciting, it’s just repetition/restatement/repeat/repeat. In short, if you want just another Foo Fighters album that sounds just like the others, this is the record for you.
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