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Foo Fighters 'In Your Honour'
If nice guys finish last, Dave Grohl has fooled the world. The former drum-lord who just so happened to have a fine line in pop-rock mastery is renowned the world over for being rock’s nicest guy. He’s got self-effacement where other rock stars are refusing to go onstage unless they get 1992 vintage bottle of Evian, humour where others are frowning to explain the seriousness of their work, and a horsey grin where others are constipating themselves trying to adopt rock’s perfect pose. Yep, if nice guys finish last, then Foo Fighters are making a mockery of us all.
Because, regardless of whether this is any good or not, it’s a surefire certainty that upon release of ‘In Your Honour’, Foo Fighters’ fifth studio album, it will make itself comfy in the higher echelons of the charts. Likewise, when they play Reading and Leeds later this summer, the horizon will just become one giant moshpit. Foo Fighters are the epitome of a mainstream rock act, which is probably why they try and fuck with the formula. A double album, one half with a firm grip on the distortion pedal, the other showing the gentle, acoustic side that the Foos have previously alluded to on the likes of ‘Walking After You’.
The rock side starts with a blistering mission statement, the rolling drums and rock riffs of the album’s title track. It sounds like nothing they’ve done before, an earthquaking union of …Trail Of Dead and the guitar lick from Radiohead’s ‘Sulk’. Then comes the FM-friendly stomp-rawks of ‘No Way Back’ and ‘DOA’ showcasing Grohl’s ability to make pop songs out of the most feral of riffs. The carnage of disc one finally subsides in the chaotic trembles of ‘End Over End’.
The last time Grohl released an acoustic CD, he was a drummer in the biggest rock band in the world. The acoustic side of ‘In Your Honour’ might have Kurt turning in his grave at certain points (Norah Jones turns up on piano and vocals on ‘Virginia Moon’) but, if anything, it’s a testament of how big Foo Fighters’ balls are. Getting the queen of MOR in has a stigma worse than Pete Doherty’s dirty underwear, but here it works, just like it works when Josh Homme helps to guide the album to a calm close on ‘Razor’. The main criticism is that the two discs have no relation to each other; they could, and perhaps should, have been two separate albums.
The nice guys might have shown their nice side, but it’s the rock side, when the band get to well and truly flex their titan-riffed biceps, that underlines Foo Fighters as reliable rock renegades. There’s not a dishonourable member amongst them.
Foo Fighters 'In Your Honour' (Roswell / BMG) Released June 13 2005.
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