Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Foo Fighters, Sony Music 2021.
The Foo Fighters latest album, Medicine At Midnight, marks a transition from indie-rock masters to kings of mainstream rock.
The opening track, Chasing Birds, is a classic piece of soft rock that sounds for all the world like an undiscovered John Lennon track.
It possesses the same airy dreaminess and the same synched vocals.
The second track, Cloudspotter, begins with a guitar riff that is the stock and trade of the Foo Fighters and it’s far more familiar territory for one of rock music’s great guitar bands.
It’s a track that pays homage to the heroes of the golden years of rock with lyrical links to stars like Jimi Hendrix.
In many ways Medicine At Midnight is the most commercially accessible album that the Foo Fighters have released and that may be both its major strength and weakness.
It’s an album that tries to straddle genres and consequently it runs the risk of satisfying the wider audience they’re targeting at the expense of their traditional fan base.
It certainly has divided the music press who have either panned it as one of the worst album’s the Foo have released or conversely as an outstanding example of Dave Grohl’s musical genius.
I’m not sure where I stand at the moment.
If you’re prepared to accept it for what it is, a lighter weight version of the Foo Fighters, then I’m sure that you’re going to enjoy its pop-rockiness.
However, if like me you crave the hard crunch of the traditional Foos then I suspect you’ll be less enamoured of it.
On my second listen I found myself hanging out for No Son Of Mine, the seventh song, which is the hardest driving cut on the album.
But even this track is a nostalgia piece, it owes much of its DNA to Phil Lynott’s Thin Lizzy.
I suppose that I’m disappointed in Medicine At Midnight because I find so much of it is derivative of a bygone era.
It seems that Grohl used his enforced isolation to trawl through his old record collection.
Maybe I’ve misread it and it was intended to be a homage album all along.
It’s still a damn sight better than much of what I’ve listened to lately and it’ll probably turn out to be wildly successful.
