Normally, Dave and his boys are right in my wheelhouse, but I heard the song they did on Saturday Night (The Sky is a Neighborhood), then again a couple more times on the radio since, and I don’t much care for it.
I focused on it tonight, while out driving the Jeep. It came on the radio and I almost changed the channel, but then thought, “Hey, this is familiar, but I don’t like it. I wonder why?”. It’s the background vocals and the chaotic nature. I dunno, I should be into it, but it ain’t working for me.
To NOT LIKE a Foo Fighter song? I’m sure this will be a passing thing.
I’m pretty tepid when it comes to the Foos, but this song doesn’t strike me as anything that stands out as bad for them. It’s a well produced, competently executed rock song, like all their songs.
I’m tepid too. Dave Grohl is a fantastic drummer and seems like a down to earth dude, but he’s trying to sing stuff his voice wasn’t made to do, imo, so there’s always studio magic/trickery involved in making him sound good on record.
Well said. As soon as I read the OP I thought “oh, he must have seen SNL”.
To be fair, I’m not a big FF fan. Mostly I just know the stuff you’d hear on the radio and I only really like about 80% of that, so I’m probably not the best judge. The song in question is outright annoying, imo, as is any song where the lead singer is screaming. Not saying that’s not a valid style (I guess) but it’s definitely not my taste. DG doesn’t have a bad voice when he actually sings.
There’s a Foos track that gets on my nerves disproportionately. It’s because it’s got such great potential but is ruined by ill-advised drumming, so rather than being a bad song per se, it’s just such a disappointment.
The intro to Best of You really pulls me in and gets me interested, then as Mr. Hawkins starts working round the kit, it sounds like it’s building…then building…expecting it to get into a classic, four-to-the-floor driving rock stomp (like so many of their songs do)…but no, it leapfrogs that, straight into the double-time, snare-on-every-beat thrash that you’d expect at the end of a song that’s really been powering along and has now become worked up into an ecstatic frenzy.
Good beginning, good ending…but the middle? The middle appears to be missing. Such a shame.
I’m not a huge Foo Fighters fan though I do like a good number of their songs. They have always been kind of “meh” to me, most of their songs are just good enough to keep me from changing the station, a lot of their early songs were really good though. Everlong though is by far their greatest song to me, they could have just stopped making music after that because that was their masterpiece as far as I’m concerned. It had amazing drumming especially on the hi hat, cool cryptic lyrics, and I absolutely loved everything about the guitar in the song, the simple fever-induced dreamlike, beginning is just so intriguing and demands your attention but in a very subtle way and then later the more epic, liberating shredding. I play bass though and the bassline on that song was pretty uninspired, just by the numbers.
I was just ribbin’ the OP, but you’ve got a point. I used to discount them, but they’ve been known to hit the nail on the head every now and then. Grohl writes a good pop song.
And I’ll agree with Gato. That song he mentioned doesn’t offer much. I realize now that I didn’t need to listen to all 4 minutes. One can get the gist of the tune in about half of that. It had no real hook, either.
My opinion should be weighed against the fact that “Gimme Stitches” is one of my FF faves. Oh, and One by One is the best; “the best, Jerry” !
They are working with a pop producer du jour (though to be fair, he played in Beck’s touring band and did a lot of other production and studio work before he was a pop sensation) to try to get whatever it is that “rock” is allowed to be these days and still play on the radio. Alternative radio is now rejecting songs with guitar, and supposed rock bands are doing songs with the dance song “drop” in them. There’s a lot of Imagine Dragons-lite sound to anything that does get played, gotta have some EDM sounding stuff with dumbed down lyrics, etc.
Echoing what others have said. I mostly like (not love) Foo Fighters and they have a couple songs that are great. I feel like I want to like them more than I want to because, for all intents and purposes, they are the last old school “rock band” out there.
