CD Review: The Foo Fighters lose their "Honor"

On their first album in three years, the Foo Fighters have decided to do double duty, releasing a double album with "loud" and "quiet" discs called "In Your Honor." It's clichÈ to say about double albums that they could or should have been trimmed back, turning an average album into something better once the filler is cut out. But "In Your Honor" has greater problems than that.

The "loud" first disc offers hardly anything new, which is what fans of the Foo Fighters have come to expect. There's a sure-fire first single, "Best of You," which fulfills the band's quota of one great song per album, along with two other songs that will probably be the next singles, "No Way Back" and "DOA." All the other tracks crash together in a combined mess of distortion, running together in a literal and sonical fashion.

It's not that the 'loud' disc is any worse than anything else the Foo Fighters have ever released. It's just that this "loud" disc very well could have been anything off of their last album "One by One," an album that even Dave Grohl, singer and songwriter for the Foo Fighters, himself dismissed as total crap in a recent interview with Blender Magazine. If I wanted to hear "One by One" again (which I don't), I'd dig it out of the back of my closet. There's a proverb in the Bible that says you're a fool if you do something stupid twice, making the person to be like a dog that eats its own vomit. And that's all that needs to be said about that.

The quieter second disc is a little easier to handle. But whatever redeeming qualities it might have are lost due to the fact that everything sounds like a desperate attempt for a rock band that only occasionally had hushed moments to suddenly sound like the Eagles. The guest appearances were completely overblown in pre-release hype; John Paul Jones might as well have been a regular session-man, Josh Homme is completely out of his element on a quiet song, and Grohl's duet with pop songstress Norah Jones wasn't life-changing at all.

The best moment on the "quiet" disc is the song "Friend of a Friend." Written in the early nineties while Grohl was in Nirvana, the song is about Kurt Cobain and how he plays guitar, "says never mind," and how "no one speaks." "Friend of a Friend" is highly reminiscent of Grohl's other songs from that time period, including the Grohl-penned Nirvana song "Marigold," in its breathy and frank melodiscism.

What doesn't work most about "In Your Honor" is the entire concept. Sure, the Foo Fighters have had great success with both loud and quiet songs. The thing is, all of the acoustic songs they have had success with have been acoustic versions of their popular loud rock songs, "Everlong," "Times Like These," etc. I wouldn't be going out on a limb if I said the best quiet song on the second disc would have been an acoustic version of "Best of You," and I wouldn't be surprised if one comes into existence soon. And isn't it completely crazy to believe that a band who couldn't throw together ten good songs three years ago could suddenly pump out twenty? It could just be that the Foo Fighters have been making a couple of missteps with their last couple of albums, but the more I listen I'm convinced that they never knew how to walk to begin with.