Review Summary: I've been throwing knives to see just where they'll land.
If
Sonic Highways were to be judged on its aims and ambitions alone, then this album would easily be the Foo Fighters’ greatest. The promotion and hype behind the Foos’ eighth album has been incredible, not to mention full of previously-unanswered questions.
“How good will this be as a follow-up to Wasting Light?”
"Will it exceed our expectations?”
“Just how diverse and different will this be?”
"Diverse and different", indeed – as the HBO series,
Sonic Highways, showed in detail, the Foo Fighters recorded a different song in different cities. Not only would the songs have influences of the music scene from said city, each song would feature a different, discrete guest, ranging from Zac Brown to two members of punk band Scream. If you can work your way around the inconvenient marriage of the Foo Fighters and, say, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, this album, especially on paper, sounds like a terrific, forward-thinking idea. So, hell,
Sonic Highways should have been great.
But in the end, the finished product is a disaster. It may very well be the most disappointing thing the Foos have ever put out – nothing about it is particularly unique or exceptional, an album that completely forgets the goal of what it was aiming for. You know, the gaffe that the
entire album resided upon.
In all honesty,
Highways is not an awful album – it is mostly tepid and unimaginative. The album only works when the band doesn’t try to stray too far from what they do best – tight melodic rock tunes with a firm grip on rhythm and excellent drumming courtesy of Taylor Hawkins. “The Feast and the Famine” is a delight, through and through – an aggressive, chaotic punk tune with rollicking guitars, fierce drumwork and Grohl’s best performance on the whole album; it’s a ridiculous song with its lyrics of revolution and anger, but it works. Meanwhile, on the second half of
Highways, “Subterranean” is a slow, dreamy track that features streaks of acoustic guitar and subtle keyboards; though six minutes is way too long for such an unchanging melody, it acquits itself tolerably well as the halfway mark of the album.
Unfortunately, that creativity isn’t very consistent. The problem with Sonic Highways is that, for all of its marketing as a unique, intelligent, culturally diverse LP, the songs are predominantly unmemorable because of how alike and uncreative they all sound. “In the Clear” would have perfectly fine off without the Preservation Hall Jazz Band guests, and ditto goes for Rick Nielson (Cheap Trick) in “Something From Nothing” – both tracks are long, dull affairs and you’d barely even notice there was a guest to begin with. “What Did I Do? / God as My Witness” is a damned peculiar song that doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to be – it firsts starts out like a
Broadway number, and then it becomes “Sweet Home Alabama”, and then its mid-section becomes something of a rock-ish waltz. Questioning this is a waste of words; "What Did I Do?" is a disaster. Ultimately, the end result is something uneven and uncomfortable –
Highways has no drive, and it’s as if they ran out of ideas somewhere along the line.
Taken as a whole,
Sonic Highways is enjoyable in spades - the musicianship is excellent as always, Dave still shouts like the best of them, and the lyrics are simple, yet well-used; but it is also brutally flawed, chock-full of problems major and minor. The reason the album is so damned unnerving and such a let-down is because the whole thing feels like a rip-off of itself, one that misses the point and sucks all the energy out of what started as a great, intriguing project, a chance to explore new territory. It is an ineffective successor to
Wasting Light; it is boring when it should be exhilarating; but, worst of all, it is an ineffective album.
