Your Summer Is Coming

Foo Fighters “Feast and the Famine”

I don’t think I’m actually invested in the Foo Fighters enough to be properly disappointed by a new Foo Fighters record, but I do think most of the songs on Sonic Highways are kinda dull, especially compared to the material on their previous album, which I’d say is one of the better records of their career. The second half of the album feels like a slog to me, and while I think it’s interesting for Grohl to let his songs sprawl out a bit, the melodies lack a spark. “The Feast and the Famine” is the one cut on Sonic Highways that seems like a classic Foo tune, but that’s in large part because it sounds just like several other classic Foo tunes. But this is the kind of song Grohl does best – urgent and aggressive, but also highly sentimental and very catchy in a sleek and dynamic way. It’s a song about growing up in D.C. and falling in love with hardcore, and while it integrates traces of D.C. punk, Grohl’s impulse to self-mythologize seems a bit at odds with the ethos of that culture.

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