Foo Fighters - 'Echoes, Silence, Patience And Grace' (RCA) Released 26/09/07

Cripes – well, we certainly weren’t expecting this. Opening with a chilly burst of icy-electro dance music, Dave Grohl’s new-look Foo Fighters continue their quest to out-Kraftwork The Knife with… Oh, who the hell are we trying to kid? Anyone approaching ‘Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace’ expecting any kind of musical leap forwards from the Grunge Ringo and co. will be sorely disappointed. However, as Foo Fighters records go, this one rocks with the best of them.

The multi-million selling rockers’ sixth album is, as expected, a muscular, hook-filled monster – designed for enormodromes and sunset festival appearances. Their signature sound - crafted lovingly over the course of twelve larynx-shattering years – is present and correct, a bunch of Los Angeles Led Zeppelin obsessives making accessible punk music, but, God, surely there’s a bit more to life than this? Returning to producer Gil Norton, who last worked with the band on their defining second album ‘The Colour and the Shape’, the new record is remarkably polished – although to some the sheen might be a little too near to Feeder’s (another of Norton’s long-term projects), whose descent into soft-rock mediocrity was all but completed by Norton’s work on ‘Pushing the Senses’. And while there’s little here to challenge an industry still reeling from the latest Radiohead opus, it cannot be denied that the Foos do what they do astonishingly effectively.

Lead single ‘The Pretender’ kicks off ‘Echoes…’ with the kind of balls-to-the-wall bombast that the newly reformed Led Zep should take note of (Grohl’s debt to Page and Plant can be seen right from the outset – ‘The Pretender’s’ introduction bears a striking resemblance to ‘Stairway to Heaven’). It’s formulaic, sure, but as an attention-grabbing opening it ranks amongst their best. It’s not quite the thudding power chords of ‘All My Life’ – probably the last great Foo Fighters single – but will reduce any lager-fuelled crowd to sweaty carnage on their forthcoming British tour. Other standout tracks, like ‘Erase/Replace’ and ‘Long Road to Ruin’ are determined examples of glossy pop-rock – eminently tuneful but a little forgetful even after repeated plays. It’s not that all recent Foo releases sound the same exactly – just a certain familiarity has crept up around this once most exciting of bands. Only ‘Cheer Up Boys (Your Makeup Is Running)’ reaches the kind of pop-rawk that has been decidedly lacking on recent Foos releases – almost the match of stone-clad classics like ‘Learn To Fly’ and ‘Monkey Wrench’.