Album of the week: In Your Honor - Has Dave Grohl stretched himself too far?

"As Dave told NME a few weeks ago, it was never part of the Foo Fighters game plan to end up in Planet Rock's premier league, either. In Dave's head this is the same band that began as the few demos that he threw together while bored in the fall-out from Nirvana. Over the years, the line-up has stabilised into guitarist Chris Shiflett, bassist Nate Mendel and, of course, everybody's favourite peroxide party lieutenant, Taylor Hawkins on drums. Sure, they've happened upon a few pan-generational anthems along the way, the best of which being 'Everlong' from 1997's 'The Colour And The Shape', a song so preternaturally uplifting that I want it at my wedding and funeral. But Dave remains fully aware that his place in history remains as a drummer, proved post-Nirvana by electrifying stints with Queens Of The Stone Age, Garbage and Nine Inch Nails. Both of those factors have meant the guy has become a demigod; and when he found himself headlining Reading for the second time, it forced a rethink.

"It was amazing how popular we'd become. We'd reached a level and it meant something," he said. In other words, Dave's decided he wants a piece of the pie in his own right. And who on God's earth could blame him?

'In Your Honour' sets out to blow apart the perception of Foo Fighters as a glorified side-project in the same way that 'American Idiot' destroyed the notion that Green Day were thick. And Dave has done such a great PR job of talking up this record as 'definitive' that there's a heftier weight of expectation surrounding it than any record he's been involved in since 'In Utero'.

Everything about 'In Your Honour' is over the top. For starters they built their own 8,000 square-foot warehouse. Next they decided to use it to make that most preposterous of labours, a double album, one half formed from their heaviest metal, the other an acoustic disc so slight that it's barely even there. No more mixing of messages. This is where they have become great.

Disc One features loads of thundering guitars and manic drum breakdowns, classic Foo structures (brash verse, anthemic chorus) and aggressively contemplative lyrics. Single "Best of You" muses furiously about the frailty of the human heart, asking clunky questions ("Were you born to resist, or be abused?/ Is someone getting the best of you?"), Grohl's chest-screams barely seeping through his bandmates' soupy guitars. The song fades out where it should climax, bleeding into "DOA", a twisty, death-obsessed cut ("It's a shame we have to disappear/ No one's getting out of here/ Alive") with docile vocals (that almost sound as if they were snatched from another song.) Meanwhile, the 70s rock-infused "Resolve", a dynamic call for tenacity, is memorable-- but still weirdly reminiscent of nearly every Foo Fighters single ever shot to radio

It's the quiet half that really makes you point and look. We've been here before of course, their starting point clearly being the solemn 'Walking After You', again from 'The Colour And The Shape'. And there was a lone moment of sublime contemplation that really did deserve a revisit. Here, finally, is the sound of a band pushing themselves, in its very restraint. If you were in Foo Fighters, it really must be difficult to resist the temptation to rock out with your cock out, but they manage it here. Disc Two opener 'Still' wafts in on a cushion of opium reverb and its feet never quite touch the ground; it's apparently the tale of a teenage suicide Grohl witnessed back in Virginia at the age of ten. Already you get the feeling that after having a rip-roaring good time of the rock half, this is actually the new Foo Fighters album. The seriousness continues on 'Friend Of A Friend', a harrowing story of wasted youth that dates back to Grohl's earliest days in Nirvana. But there's light as well: Taylor Hawkins, the band's resident funboy, gets a go at fronting the band on the zippy, handclappy 'Cold Day In The Sun', the closest cousin of vintage acoustic Foos tracks like 'Big Me'. But most striking of all is the fabled Norah Jones collaboration 'Virginia Moon', a lilting bossa nova smooch that's all the more lovely for being played totally straight.

Dave wanted this to be remembered as the definitive Foo Fighters album. Well, we're afraid that one's still 'The Colour And The Shape'. 'In Your Honour', on the other hand, feels a bit like your bedroom partner trying on all kinds of flash costumes and gadgets to try and excite you, and the realisation that it wasn't really necessary and they wouldn't have had to bother had you just shown them a little more love in the first place. But then you still have a rip-roaring session anyway, even if you do now have to live with the image of your girlfriend having the face of Dave Grohl.

There is a ten-on-ten single album lurking somewhere within this record's mammoth tracklisting but even that wouldn't be the sort of Green Day-style reinvention that silly us were expecting; because you don't want that from Foo Fighters. Like New Order or the post-Richey Manics, they've always been the sound of survival, and survival is a dependable, workmanlike thing that, just like Uncle Dave, is never supposed to be too dangerous. At least when he isn't behind the drumstool, Grohl is never going to make your spine do somersaults and you wouldn't want him to. The guy that once did that - his mate, our Messiah - is dead. Instead, Grohl can rest easy simply being the everyman. 'In Your Honour' is fine, but Dave didn't need to try being superhuman, because there goes my hero: he's ordinary. "

From Pitchfork and NME

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