Hey look! It\u2019s a classic rock party record!<\/p>\n
No, it\u2019s not Van Halen or AC\/DC, but the Foos\u2019 10th album is clearly meant to be a soundtrack for a fun night, assuming you are over 30 and \u201cfun\u201d means \u201cdrinking beer and playing cards with your friends.\u201d <\/p>\n
Opening cut \u201cMaking A Fire\u201d may lead one to believe this is dance rock, but that\u2019s an anomaly. The record is the same basic Foo Fighters template, but the songs are zippier, more upbeat, less screaming, less anthemic. It\u2019s also very short, zipping by in 36 minutes, with seven cheerful tracks and two slower ones that will of course sound great live. That\u2019s where the Foos flourish, as we all know.<\/p>\n
Whether the nods to classic rock are intentional is debatable; riffs that sound like Motorhead, Queen and Alice Cooper are scattered around the album, while the bluesy guitar solo in the title track owes its spirit to either Hendrix or Gary Clark Jr. My take is that it\u2019s all intentional, that Dave Grohl and his crew intended the album to recall a certain sound and mood, on a throughline from Some Girls <\/i>to Van Halen II <\/i>to Ace of Spades <\/i>to The Colour And The Shape<\/i> to Lenny Kravitz, but with a more modern update and less sense of humor.<\/p>\n
If that sounds good to you, then you\u2019ll enjoy this disc. What the album lacks is that plodding, by-the-numbers, professional rock and roll sound that clogs up about half of each Foo Fighters album. This means there\u2019s nothing as fist-pumpingly heroic as \u201cWalk\u201d or \u201cOutside,\u201d or \u201cTimes Like These,\u201d but again, that\u2019s not the point this time around. The point of Medicine <\/i>is to tap your feet and smile and maybe headbang or play air guitar a bit. <\/p>\n
\u201cMaking A Fire\u201d employs handclaps and female \u201cna-na\u201d vocals in and around Grohl\u2019s power chords to fun effect, while leadoff single \u201cShame Shame\u201d goes for a slinky, sulky groove that relies less on guitar and more on percussion; unfortunately, it lacks the dynamics to really coalesce into a classic, becoming repetitive in the second half.<\/p>\n
Better is the chunky riffing of \u201cCloudspotter,\u201d while the acoustic\/string \u201cWaiting On A War\u201d (reportedly inspired by a comment Grohl\u2019s teenage daughter made) overcomes its underdeveloped lyrics with slow-building tension that explodes into a triumphant ending; it will be a crowd pleaser in concert. However, the one-two punch of \u201cNo Son Of Mine\u201d and \u201cMedicine At Midnight\u201d are two of the band\u2019s best songs in the last 20 years, the latter featuring a killer riff and attitude to burn, the former an urgent psychedelic rocker with a bluesy guitar solo that, frankly, I didn\u2019t know this band had in them.<\/p>\n
As noted, the songs don\u2019t really change the Foo Fighters playbook, but there are enough twists and sonic embellishments to make this one more memorable than the last two albums. No special guests, no gimmicks, just a rock band having fun and hoping you do the same. With the bulk of Medicine At Midnight<\/i>, it\u2019s hard not to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":34250,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5859],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-46083","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-foo-fighters","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46083"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}