My Friend Foo

The Foo Fighters are about to release their fifth studio album, a two-CD collection that frontman Dave Grohl describes as “definitive”. According to Grohl, the double CD set (one acoustic album and one rawk) “will surprise you. It surprises me”.

In a note posted on the band’s official website (www.foofighters.com), Grohl recounts the mammoth effort that went into creating the 20-track double opus: “Almost a year in the making, from five hours of bedroom demos, to warehouses being built from the ground up, to months of rehearsals, to the construction of an 8,000 square foot classic recording studio, to the recording of 40 songs, to the final track list of 20 songs, it is by far the most ambitious project I have ever had anything to do with in my entire life.”
He goes on: “There are subtleties. There are complexities. There are extremities. There are familiarities. There is orchestration. There is simplicity. There is a pile of blown speakers on the floor.”
According to the singer, never before have the band put so much effort into the making of an album, which took more than nine months to record, compared to just six days for their first album, released almost a decade ago to the day.
In Your Honor features some unusual guest musicians. Led Zeppelin piano player John Paul Jones tinkles some ivories, while, perhaps more surprisingly, nouveau soul chanteuse Norah Jones lends her tonsils to the gorgeous Cole Porter-esque duet that is ‘Virgina Moon’, a radical departure for the band who gave us ‘Monkey Wrench’ and ‘Everlong’.
If you're starting to panic that the Foos have left their rockin’ roots behind them, don't. The first CD is a full-frontal sonic assault on the senses that rarely pauses to take a breath. The opening title track begins with an epic three-note guitar riff, before the truly monumental drum salvo blasts off and we’re off on our merry way through ten tunes of driving guitars, pounding rhythms and infectious melodies that occupy the terrain midway between Springsteen and Nirvana.
Highlights include the brilliant current single, ‘Best Of You’, the epic stadium rock of ‘The Last Song’, the classic Foo Fighters sound of ‘No Way Back’ and the six-minute stompathon of ‘End Over End’, which perfectly showcases their mixture of muscular guitar riff-o-rama and contagious choruses, and is sure to be one of the standouts on their forthcoming world tour.
The second disc of acoustic, mellower songs almost sounds like a different band (somewhat akin to when Tesla released their superb Five Man Acoustical Jam). On ‘What If I Do’, Grohl sounds so laid-back, he could be mistaken for one of Jack Johnson’s singin’ surfer buddies, while the bittersweet Beatles-ish melody of ‘Another Round’ takes the Foos’ songwriting into new territory altogether. Elsewhere, there’s the dreamy, atmospheric mid-paced acoustic pop of ‘On The Mend', the sound of a band at their most vulnerable and exposed, the Nick Drake-ish ‘Razor’, more haunting and affecting than anything they’ve produced to date, and the aforementioned ‘Virginia Moon’, a timeless lullaby which will surprise and frighten their hardcore fans in equal measure.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Dave Grohl admitted that he was “pissed” at himself for their last album (“Four of the songs were good, and the other seven I never played again in my life”), but he feels they have more than made up for it this time around.
“When someone comes up to you and asks which Led Zeppelin album they should buy, you should say Physical Graffiti,” he opined recently. “And in 20 years, when your kid comes up to you and asks which Foo Fighters album he or she should buy, I want you to say In Your Honor.”

In Your Honor is released on Roswell Records/RCA on June 10.