Foo Fighter's "Sonic Highways" Reviewed

Great Album Cover: Grade: A

I  regret every mean thing I’ve ever said about Dave Grohl, I should have left it all for Sonic Highways because anything I add here will sound like overkill and meanwhile, in retrospect, even if Dave Grohl did record Wasted Light in his swimming pool or garage or something, it was a more solid album then I claimed it was at the time. A  “C+” and I was “C- “ing it, I went Bob Lefsetz on his ass. No, of course I didn’t, nobody did, LIKE it, it sucked but it didn’t Sonic Highways suck.

Is Sonic Highways the worst album of the year? It could be, it could be worse than the entirety of Melody Road combined with The Flaming Lips Beatles travesty, it could be a horrible painful noise, overblown without being anthemic rock and roll so hollow and sterile it boggles the mind. I don’t think it is possible to over state the case for the rottenness of the entire affair, it makes Songs Of The Innocent sound like Zootopia.

The Foos recorded eight songs for the album, each in a different US city: Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Seattle, and Washington, D.C for an HBO TV series (which I happily passed on) and unbelievably, they are all terrible. Ben Gibbard, Joan Jett, Joe Walsh, Gary Clark jr for fuck’s sake,  and not one of them can save the band from the relentless mediocrity that is the brain of Dave Grohl. The big song on the album “I Am A River” is a disgrace of craft and money : a big orchestrated plane crash ends the album, the tasty licks by Rick Neilsen doesn’t come within a million miles of saving opening track “Something From Nothing” -where, that Grohl singing, stop it just… stop. And it between, geez, the lyric to “What Did I Do/God Is My witness” isn’t writing, it’s typing.   Hey maybe “Subterranean” is the worst track on the album… maybe right? Ben does himself no favors. Nobody does.

The guest stars don’t help, the studios make not a whit of difference, the playing is loud and boring, the middling rock is an affront to 1992. The only reason I didn’t give it a D- is because the album cover is great. It stinks.

Grade: D