Review Summary: Getting good at starting over.
Albums like
Wasting Light are awfully refreshing. Even for the Foo Fighters - a band known for their accessibility and lack of adornment, something that has simultaneously kept them afloat and held them back -
Wasting Light is refreshingly straightforward, simple, and effortlessly likable in spite of it not being particularly artful or interesting. It thrives in its simplicity - out of its eleven tracks, there's not a single one that exceeds five minutes, a choice that keeps the album's overall pace nice and brisk. The Foo Fighters have ditched their more "experimental" tracks like "The Pretender" or the kind of material you'd find on the second disc of
In Your Honor, and have instead honed in on fine-tuning the anthemic, hard-hitting melodic rock they're known for.
Wasting Light is a retreat to safety, to be sure, but as far as the Foo Fighters' discography goes, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an album with as little skippable material as the filler-less
Wasting Light.
The dissonant, rocking belter "Burning Bridge" kicks things off perfectly. Its' atonal, off-kilter opening riff transforms into a massive wall of bouncy, distorted guitars and galloping drums that seamlessly dovetails into a verse whose descending, chromatic melody suits the "
Down crooked stairs and sideways glances" lyric to an absolute T. This is four mintues of hard-rock ear candy, and
Wasting Light rarely dips from this level of quality afterwards. "Rope" is a chilly track with a stop-and-go, bass-heavy riff and a dual-octave melody shared between two Dave Grohls, and there's a killer dichotomy present on "Arlandria", its soft, melodic, fluttering verses and big, Southern-tinged chorus creating a delicious duality rife with tension and unpredictability. "White Limo" is one of the heaviest and most ferocious tracks the Foo Fighters had penned in quite some time, an adrenaline-pumping three-and-a-half minutes whose snarling, ferocious riff underscores Grohl's chaotic, punkish screaming perfectly.
The softer moments on
Wasting Light are surprisingly touching and memorable. "These Days" is one of the prettiest songs they've written to date, Grohl's moody yet uplifting crooning of sobering lyrics like "
One of these days your eyes will close and pain will disappear" accentuating the melodic, Beatles-esque instrumentation perfectly. "I Should Have Known" is downright haunting in places, marrying a dark, crisp, and heavily-processed guitar to thick, distorted bass, eerie string synths, and Grohl's pained belting, an evocative and wistful expression of darkness that adds a lot of weight to lines like "
Lay your hands in mine; heal me one last time." Even the weakest of the 'softer' bunch, "A Matter of Time", has its emotional strengths, its descending, gentle verses bolstered by one of Grohl's best performances on the record - it's not as structurally sound as the previous two tracks, but it's emotive and melodic enough to keep you invested and engaged.
Wasting Light isn't without its shortcomings. "Dear Rosemary" would be a perfectly salvageable rocker were it not for the fact that it sounds
dangerously close to "Steady As She Goes", and "Miss the Misery" may have one of the strongest choruses on the record, but it's neutered by a frankly uninteresting set of verses and prechoruses with a strange lack of musical momentum, verses that huddle around a rhythm that just doesn't really
go anywhere until the chorus swoops in to save it. And "Back and Forth" is structurally confused, its patchwork composition sounding more like three different songs clumsily stitched into one - the verses feature a straightforward, chugging rhythm that awkwardly burst into an atonal, chromatic prechorus before fumbling its way into a poppy, come-on-and-sing-along chorus that has nothing to do with the musical ideas that preceded it.
That said, even the "nadir" of
Wasting Light is hardly enough to ruin the overall album's experience. By the time the album reaches its anthemic, rousing finale, "Walk", the listener's been treated to what might be the most consistent record the Foo Fighters have put out since their self-titled debut back in 1995. The very worst thing you could say about
Wasting Light is that it's appealing without being particularly ambitious; and yet, that's hardly a sin, because the restraint present on
Wasting Light works tremendously well in its favor. With perhaps the exception of the soul-stirring "I Should Have Known", there's nothing game-changing or groundbreaking here -
Wasting Light has no delusions of grandeur whatsoever, and comfortably acquits itself as a record full of simple pleasures. But they are pleasures nevertheless, and it's a satisfying, refreshing version of something we've all heard before.
RECOMMENDED TRACKS:
Bridge Burning
Rope
These Days
I Should Have Known
