Hard to believe it's been ten years since David Grohl first emerged from the ashes of Nirvana, raised his hand, and asked to be selected as the man to drive forward American rock music.
Even the most optimistic listener couldn’t have predicted the former drummer’s batch of demos would contain such anthems as ‘This Is A Call’, or that he’d be able to follow up Nirvana with another hugely successful outfit.
Yet despite all their accomplishments, the Foo Fighters still have great deal to prove. For all their platinum discs, anthemic singles and sold out tours, they’ve yet to release an album of any real consistence. Grohl could have been speaking about any of the Foo’s previous LPs when he recently said of 2002’s One By One that “Four of the songs were good, and the other seven I never played again in my life.”
Since their eponymous debut they have, without fail, surrounded a fistful of nuggets with a bucket load of duds. The announcement that they were to mark their fifth studio album with a two-disc collection led many to believe that Grohl had finally bitten off more than he could chew.
How would America’s most consistently inconsistent band be able to sustain your attention over a double album? And what was Norah Jones doing in the studio with them?
The biggest surprise of all is that they come within a whisker of pulling it off. On disc one you get the usual full on assault on the senses, while disc two treats the listener to an acoustic, mellower and even pastoral offering of tracks from what sounds like an entirely different band.
Kicking off the ‘rock’ side with a hail of feedback, Grohl screams: “Can you hear me? Hear me screaming” on the album's title track. Inspired by Grohl's stint as a campaigner for Presidential hopeful John Kerry, the track exudes an urgency that is carried into ‘No Way Back’, a close relation of ‘Everlong’ and already a Foo's classic.
It gets even better. ‘Best Of You’ we know already is their best work yet, while forthcoming single ‘DOA’ hammers its way into your sub conscious. This is a breathtaking start. ‘Hell’ may mark the project's first filler, but no need to panic. Two minutes later they’re back on track. By ‘End Of End’ we’re hailing the Foo’s best batch of songs to date. One-nil but only half time.
The second disc is what will intrigue most listeners. Opener ‘Still’ comes through the speakers drowned in reverb, and documents a railway suicide in Grohl’s home town of Virginia. It’s a downbeat, intriguing, beginning. Delving further in, ‘Friend Of A Friend’, penned on a Nirvana tour back in 1992, could be Nirvana’s ‘Polly’, while ‘Cold Day In The Sun’ sees Taylor Hawkins do a Grohl and move centre stage.
It’s ‘Miracle’ though, with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones on piano, that is the first acoustic track to truly spark as Grohl lifts and lilts a gorgeous melody.
Elsewhere the addition of the other Jones works well on the bossa nova duet ‘Virginia Moon’ and haunting closer ‘Razor’ is also a highlight.
Though Grohl’s voice often lacks the necessary emotion to carry ten acoustic tracks, In Your Honour, as a whole, is much better than we could have expected.
This album is unquestionably a career landmark then. Grohl‘s vision was to make the definitive Foo Fighters album. “When your kid comes up to you and asks which Foo Fighters album he or she should buy,” he said last month, “I want you to say In Your Honour.” In this regard he’s succeeded. Job well done.