Review Summary: 4 + 7 = 4
I really want to like this album, I really do. I don't know why, but there's just something about that 'darker and edgier' tag that just drives people
crazy. Hype blooms to unprecedented levels. People go gaga, and they just
can't wait for that one album, because it's going to be
darker, and more
aggressive, or whatever. Does it really mean what the populace thinks it means? Anyway, this same phenomenon happened to Foo Fighters' fourth album, 2002's "One by One". And with the release of lead single
All My Life, it really seemed like Foo Fighters were going to pull that "darker and edgier" shift off, and with aplomb too. A soft verse over near-whispered vocals that explodes into a high-octane track, with Grohl's frantic vocals over dissonant riffs. Such a song pretty much entails a recipe for disaster on the radio, but it was
everywhere, peaking high on the Billboard Hot 100, and it seemed that the Foo Fighters had successfully managed to combine that trademark FF vibe with a darker and edgier tone.
Or had they?
Press that play button, and your ears are assaulted with a barrage of aggressive, exceptional tracks. Opener
All My Life is superseded by
Low, where alternatingly escalating and descending riffs weave out of one ear and into another to form a vicious successor to the opening track. The following tracks,
Have it All and the smash hit
Times Like These combine this aggression with the trademark Foo Fighters mid-tempo rock formula, with pleasant results, especially so for the impressive
Times Like These, which manages to shine as one of the album's standouts.
And as track 5,
Disenchanted Lullaby begins to grace your ears, you sit back, content, completely assured that you've made an excellent purchase, ready to enjoy more Foo Fighters brilliance. It's at this point that the slightest of doubts begin to seep into your mind; while the song is for the most highly enjoyable, and a pleasant execution of Foo Fighter's slow soft-to-loud rock songs, it suffers from overlength, and you can't help but feel just the slightest trace of boredom by the end of the track.
But as you console yourself that the track isn't a sign of things to come, and that every album will of course have songs that are weaker than the others, your doubts are further embedded into your mind with the next song,
Tired of You. And again, the song isn't
bad, being one of the darkest on the album, and adopting a more minimalistic approach with muted power chords leading the way throughout the song. But do you really think you can listen to the same power chords over and over again for over 5 minutes with little developments throughout? And, to your fear, you can feel the quality slowly slipping away; to have been reduced from a song having successfully molded innovative time signatures and strange keys into radio-friendly brilliance (
Times Like These) to a dull song with nothing but slow, grinding power chords within two tracks is quite an ominous sign indeed.
Sadly, it's at this point where the album really takes a dive for the worse, and we're only just halfway through. And it's not until this point where the problems which have slowly been making an appearance in this album burst full-fledged onto the scene. The greatest sin committed by these tracks is that they simply aren't
memorable, not in the slightest; I've listened to this album so many times for this review, and yet I can only just barely remember what these songs even sound like. The songs just pass by drearily, one test of patience after another. At this point, you're trying your best to like the songs, you really are. You're letting those minuscule faults pass by, trying your best to earnestly think "Hey, these songs are alright!" instead of forcing that thought into your cranium. Well,
Halo wasn't too bad, and it sure had a rockin' bridge, you tell yourself.
But as much as you try giving an excuse for every single song, you just can't; these songs just segue into one another, lifeless, phlegmatic; we even come to the point where we are forced to label, for the first time in FF's career, a song as simply 'awful' (
Burn Away, featuring the most irritating series of riffs and Dave Grohl's worst vocal performance, ever) and this is where you realise one of the most stonking monstrous problems with this album. Arguably my biggest gripe with this album is its production. My god, the production. The major issue with the production is that it over-polishes the songs to such a terrifying extent that it saps any existing energy out of a great majority of the tracks on this album, to such an extent that the songs don't feel like they have any strength to them. They just pass by, lethargic and uninspired. A prime example of this are songs like
Low and
Have it All, which, despite stellar songwriting, don't reach their full expansive potential due to this life-sucking production. Seriously. I'd like to invite you to search for the demo for
Have it All on YouTube, and listen to it. Foo Fighters discarded
that for being too tame, too lifeless. And they let
this pass?!
Another problem I noticed is that you can see they're trying to add that darker, edgier tone to songs that would sound perfectly fine without it, and that's what drags many of these songs down. For instance, Dave Grohl tries to sing in a more brooding, sullen tune in line with their 'darker and aggressive' stance in several songs that contradicts the more upbeat nature of the instrumentals. This, sadly, ruins a lot of songs with potent instrumentals and turns what was once Foo Fighters' greatest asset, Grohl's voice, into an irritation. The prime example of this is closer
Come Back, where a delicately melodic guitar line is somewhat let down by Grohl's vocal performance, where he tries to give the song that more brooding feel, admittedly ruining a song with so much potential. Compare this, again, with the demo of this song, where not only is the production more clear, but it shows what this song once could have been, without Grohl's unnecessary depressive voice.
You know what? I actually have a good guess as to where so many of this album's faults stem from, and that is Grohl's time with Queens of the Stone Age during the recording of "Songs for the Deaf". Foo Fighters were admittedly bored of making one pleasant-to-the-ears rock album after another, discarding perfectly fine demos in the process of their making this album (too tame, they said). Of course QOTSA's no-nonsense, darker, aggressive tunes appealed to Grohl, who became QOTSA's temporary drummer during the making of their album. No wonder that same mediocre production found in "Songs for the Deaf" appeared in "One by One", albeit to a lesser extent. The difference was that that production worked in "Songs for the Deaf" because of how much more aggressive and high-octane their songs were. Did Grohl really think that sort of production was going to work with mid-tempo blusters like
Overdrive? QOTSA really did something to Grohl's head, and that just ended in "One by One" resembling something akin to a failed experiment, shamefully sitting in the Foo Fighters' discography.
And in the end, this album just wasn't good enough. It's already stretching it quite a bit to say that the first 6 tracks out of 11 are enjoyable, and in those first 6 tracks, the first 4 stand head over shoulders above the rest. 4 good tracks is not reason enough to make an album, and that's all "One by One" was; a shallow, lifeless excuse for an album that could have been something else altogether with a bit more thinking through.
