Foo Fighters: “Sonic Highways”/U2: “Songs of Innocence” It’s not just because this has been a year of gimmick album launches that I want to compare Foo Fighters’ “Sonic Highways” with U2’s “Songs of Innocence”, but that’s a good place to start. U2 dropped their album into the library of every iTunes user in the world simultaneously. I thought this was darn nice of them, but some people (mostly people who never mess with any default settings) got clobbered with 300mb of iPhone download usage. Oops. I do like Bono’s take on the debacle, though: some people who had no idea who U2 were now hate them, so that’s an improvement in the relationship, right? For the Foos, the gimmick was a massive, multi-level tie-in with a TV show on HBO, a series of special festivals next summer and a solid week playing on the David Letterman Show. More old-school, less tech-savvy, but they pulled it off with a lot more competence. The Late Show appearances featured covers of classic songs by some of the guest artists featured in the TV show and on the record and were a blast to watch. More importantly, the connection between the promotional gimmicks and the actual songs was logical and it is all out there to see when you watch the show. Why cover a Cheap Trick song on Letterman? Because on the show, they are in Chicago and Rick Neilson drops by to play baritone guitar on a song (BTW, baritone =awesome!) That substantive connection carries over into the music, as well. Both bands suddenly want to pay tribute to their influences in 1970s-80s punk. For U2, that’s “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)”, which has a sound that’s as far away from the Ramones as is Adele (whose producer U2 hired). Bono, rightly, says that imitating his heroes would have been taken as an insult by the Ramones, but I think the late Joey would also have been insulted by the hero worship lyrics. “We like The Ramones. They sounded good to us when we were kids.” That doesn’t tell us much that we didn’t already know. (For a better Ramones tribute, try Sleater-Kinney’s “I Want to be Your Joey Ramone”, which turns their style into a perfect pick-up line.) The exception in the song is Larry Mullen, Jr.’s frantic drumming which is totally punk rock. The Foo Fighters also pay tribute to their key punk influences on “The Feast and the Famine”, which features a similarly frenetic beat. The big difference is that the song evokes the style of influential punks without name-checking Minor Threat in the lyrics. Instead, Dave Grohl sings about injustice and inequality—the things about punk that made him want to express himself through music. What was it about The Ramones that caught Bono’s attention when he was a teen? Certainly not Joey’s singing. Punk is the sound of the dispossessed screaming for attention. Grohl’s song demanding that attention be paid to those who are overlooked makes a much better tribute than Bono admiring the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard. “Songs of Innocence” is, as Bono is telling everyone in the press, the band’s most personal and introspective album. They are telling the real stories from their actual lives with no sugar-coating. Here’s how Bono feels about his mother. Here’s what it was like to witness a terrorist bombing. Here’s what happened on the street when he was living next door to his buddy, Gavin. This is actually not the kind of thing that pop music is very good at. It feels awkward. Grohl emptied his heart out on 2011’s “Wasting Light”, opening a window on every demon and every conflicting emotion stemming from the suicide of his famous best friend, but he also put a little bit of distance in there. The songs were fiction, not memoir. He was mad at his relationship with Kurt’s relatives, but he made a song about “Dear Rosemary”, not “Dear Courtney”. The result was a heart-wrenching masterpiece that hit emotional notes anyone who’s ever lost anyone (which is everyone) could identify with. Three years ago, Rolling Stone wondered if there were enough amplifiers in the world to drown out Grohl’s hurt, but it looks like maybe there were. Or at least, as a songwriter, maybe he felt he had mined that vein enough for the time being. Unfortunately, that left him without a lot of inspiration. The band took a year off. Grohl produced some other bands (Zac Brown, Ghost BC) and looked for new ideas. “Sonic Highways” is an experiment in the search for inspiration—Grohl’s “8 ½”. He lets us tag along (on TV) as he travels from city to city, towing along a band with eight completed rock songs that have no lyrics. He gives himself a realty-show challenge to interview musicians and cultural figures in each city for a week to see if they can give him enough inspiration to have something to sing on the last day. Then, they put the results on a CD and put it up for sale. “Something from Nothing” is his thesis statement. He imagines himself as the city of Chicago, before the fire, ready to burn himself down and start over. He acknowledges the long line of singers and musicians who stretch back to forever who created the music he wants to make, but also insists that he can be something completely original and new. In each of the eight cities, he hopes to find out what that is. “In the end we all come from what’s come before” but “I came from nothing.” Can he be both at once? I guess that’s where art comes from. Grohl also seems to draw inspiration from the collaborations he makes with artists based in each city on each song. Gary Clark, Jr.’s solo over the outro to “What did I do to Deserve You?/God as my Witness” is, unsurprisingly, a masterpiece, but Zac Brown’s harmonies on “Congregation” seem to drive Dave to be a better singer, too. U2 collaborated with nearly every producer in the business over the past five years, from Marc Ronson to Danger Mouse. The common thread, according to the band, was that they wanted them to stop using their musical genius to cover up for poor songwriting; to make this album about the songs and stories, not the sonic landscapes. The result is the most restrained guitar playing you will ever hear from The Edge. He becomes a session-man, providing the pop backdrop for Bono to be the frontman. If you check out the acoustic versions of some songs that are available, you can hear this idea taken to an extreme that actually works better than the full-band pop songs. The confessional lyrics sound much more biting and genuine as folk than they do as pop. Mullen and Adam Clayton don’t seem to have gotten the memo and are all over the place, jamming down as always. They really are one of the great rhythm sections in rock and are pleasantly untamed on “Songs of Innocence”. Another connection between the two bands comes on the Foo’s “Outside”, which was recorded in a studio out in Joshua Tree, California, and features bass playing by Nate Mendel that sounds like it came right out of Clayton’s 1986 “Joshua Tree” sessions—it starts as a propulsive New Wave song before building to moody classic rock that evokes Pink Floyd, or the more experimental phases of The Eagles (Joe Walsh plays guitar on the track) cranked up to the speed of The Strokes. I was disappointed to read Mullen bashing U2’s previous album, “No Line on the Horizon”. He especially hated the song “Get on your Boots”, which I don’t get, because it’s one of the most rocking tunes they’ve ever recorded. He said if “No Line…” had been their final statement as a band, he would have been disappointed, but he almost feels like if they quit now, he would be okay with it. Wow, is he ever backwards. Like this year’s Foo Fighters, 2009’s U2 left their usual haunts to look for inspiration, setting up in Morocco and living there for months to absorb a new vibe. What they created wound up being U2’s version of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony—inscrutable, hard to get into, dangerous and exhilaratingly joyous. It has moments of Foo-style, fist-pumping, chant-along, anthemic rock and a devastating ending. Judging by how much of these two new records I’m already singing along to, “Sonic Highways” is the Album of the Year while “Songs of Innocence” is going to get filed right under “How To Disarm an Atomic Bomb” as U2’s lowest-quality effort. There are at least four songs on “Sonic Highways” that should go immediately into the Foo Fighters classic canon: “Something from Nothing”, “What did I do…”, “The Feast and the Famine” and the New Orleans song, “In the Clear”. That would rank it as their third or fourth-best album, on my list. The big question now is what will these bands do for inspiration next? I hope Mullen is wrong about feeling satisfied with “…Innocence” and that the rumors of a more rocking “Songs of Experience” materialize into better results. On the other hand, I hope that Dave Grohl’s reality TV tour of American musical history has filled his inspiration tank back to the top and has the Foo Fighters driving toward their next epic rock destination.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 21:56:06 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015