So what we have here is a sexy Foo Fighters album, and it’s up to you to determine who those scary phrases should scare, exactly. Midnight remedy, the gray-haired veteran rock band’s tenth album in an illustrious humble 26-year career, has only a touch of stealth, light dance-groove, and vague atmospheric lust. But even the slightest deviation from the heroism of manual labor, everything but guitar rap and country has always sounded positively cataclysmic from the indomitable Dave Grohl and his various friends. “If / You / Want / Stop / I will be the one, be the language that will swallow you”, he offers in an oddly satisfying kind of half growl, half whisper while the support singers chant “Shame / Shame / Shame / Shame “And the usual loud guitars are grouped in a concise spot. Huh. The song is called” Shame Shame “; in the video, Grohl plays with a dancer model in a scary Gothic ballet frame. The part where he starts to dig a pit (presumably) with his guitar certainly looks, uh, symbolic, but from what, exactly?
The Foo Fighters – now a six-man operation, although the slender piece Midnight remedy rarely sounds like that– exhaled the palpable energy of Last Rock Band Standing for at least half of their 25-year career, when steel rockers became papal rockers and grandparents rockers (guitarist Pat Smear is 61 years old!) Raging against the death of the lights of the arena. Every time rock ‘n’ roll dies – as a genre, if not a lifestyle – somehow, it just makes them stronger. Grohl started Foos as a solo show a few months after Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, and that first self-titled album in 95 is unstable and haunted by the death of the ray gun on the album cover onwards, but it is also animated by good humor Grohl and captivating pop sensibility and radiant stupidity. (Dig your braids in the super-silly video for “Big Me”.) Incredibly, the Nirvana drummer had, in an instant, transformed himself into a charismatic frontman and rock star obsessed with spotlight in his own right, and nowadays when I stumble on archival footage like this, it takes me a few seconds to identify Grohl as the live action Beavis and Butt-Head character swinging awkwardly on the far left.
Foo Fighters’ biggest song is 1997’s “Everlong”, their best song is the massive 2005 “Best of You” (Prince agrees), and their last song I can’t live without is 2007’s “Let It Die,” , a small masterpiece of dynamic ferocity that shocks you with how exciting Grohl can emerge from a roller coaster from an obstinate arc of silence to very high. Counting this new one, Foo Fighters has released four more albums since then, none terrible, none terribly revealing. The previous one, from 2017 Concrete and gold, seems to me the definitive title of the Foos album: brilliant and engaging if you spend a lot of time with it, monotonous and indefinite if you don’t.
But Midnight remedy It’s a little more nimble from the start, nine energetic songs that throw some smooth but extravagant curved balls, from funk noir with low-oriented title track to the glammy tiny cowbell prank “Cloudspotter”. I don’t historically give a damn what Grohl is singing about, and I still don’t, but I’m still drawn to his affably screaming voice anyway, even when – maybe especially when – I can predict your rising chord changes before they happen and feel the guitar distortion in a few seconds before it actually happens. At a half-cool riff festival like “Holding Poison”, you struggle with the fine line between Boring and satisfactory, in between static and consistent. Except it never sounds like a fight.
So, the Foos are, and always have been, and if God wants to always remain safe, and as far as rock ‘n’ roll is concerned, this will always, paradoxically, be a risky move, and also the most impressive proof that Grohl’s experiences with Nirvana, both the trebles that define the generation and the crushing bass , never left him. “We were accused of being the least dangerous band in the world and I think that’s justified in a way,” said Grohl The New York Times in a February profile of Foo Fighters. “Because I know what it’s like to be in that other band, and I know what it can lead to.” The best music of Midnight remedy it’s an anti-war anthem called “Waiting on a War”: it starts out soft and acoustic (try to guess the chord changes) and eventually explodes in fire arena rock proportions (try to guess exactly when). You can live without it, which is not necessarily a blow to him.
Perhaps you saw the Foo Fighters playing their 2002 hit “Times Like This” during President Biden’s strange and spectacular opening in January; perhaps you laughed when you realized that a 19-year-old half-cold rock anthem is the perfect way to sum up Biden’s worldview, a centrist recreation of an idyllic past that never existed. But Grohl can still sell that song, and any other half-cool jam he wants to sing, like a rock star drained of danger and profound surprise, but never entirely of vitality. “There must be more than that,” he sings as “Waiting on a War” finally turns into a supernova, and there really isn’t, but that doesn’t mean it’s not enough.