Wasted light???

Just finished listening to the Foo Fighters latest album Wasting Light, which I bought day at HMV, and to be honest I thought it was a bit of a disappointment.  Dave Grohl seems to have taken the approach of going back to his rock "roots" so to speak, but unfortunately despite a few standout tracks it just sounds like a bland generic rock album.

The first song on it "Bridge Burning" is a fairly good opener and gets your hopes up that this is going to be a good album, and the excellent first single "Rope" is a great second that backs this up.  But unfortunately after that the album takes a dive in quality as "Dear Rosemary" is a rather dull sounding rocky lullaby.  "White Limo" however is very good and very catchy too.  But the album again takes a dip with "Arlandria" and "These days", they both just sound like very average MOR rock, the sort that the Foo Fighters really shouldn't be aiming to put out.  "Back and Forth" is an improvement and offers quite a good chorus riff and "A matter of time" is easily one of the strongest songs on the album, which almost sounds reminiscent of Biffy Clyro with its slight angular quality.  If they had chosen to go down the angular route a tad more it would have made it a more exciting and interesting album to listen to, but as it stands its half a good album, and half a mediocre sounding one, which by the way also has too many "ooohhhs" over-dubbed on it by Dave!  And mediocre is not a word I would normally associate with the Foos.

Similarly their fourth album One by One, which has some good strong tracks (namely "All my life", "Low", "Times Like These" which they all play to this day) also fell foul of this problem too, as it had featured some average numbers by their standards too, even Dave Grohl in the ensuing years regarded it as his least favourite as he felt they rushed it.  I wonder if he will feel the same about Wasting Light?  And this album has a similar feel, it doesn't feel like a carefully crafted Foos album, it just sounds like they went into the studio and layed down some tracks and thought "yep, they'll do".  This is a shame after their excellent Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace album, and "Rope" promised a great deal as the first single from Wasting Light, but about half of the album falls way short of the mark.

Perhaps in time I might regard it a little differently, it might be a grower, but as it stands at the moment, I think the Foo Fighters can do much better.  So for me its a 6/10.