Foo Fighters - Concrete and Gold

Pitchfork 65

Nine albums in and Dave Grohl knows how to keep the machine running. *Concrete and Gold* is reliable, relatable, and powerful with just barely enough new ideas to keep things interesting.

The Guardian 60

With guest slots for Paul McCartney and Justin Timberlake, the help of Adele co-writer Greg Kurstin and lyrics about Nazi-fixated punks, Dave Grohl finds just enough inspiration to keep the ball rolling

Few artists make the business of being in a hugely successful rock band seem as breezy and straightforward as Foo Fighters. In their world, there never seems to be much in the way of angst or agonising or artistic differences – three things frontman Dave Grohl presumably had enough of to last a lifetime while he was in Nirvana – just an endless succession of platinum albums, magazines featuring Grohl’s face inevitably gurning good-naturedly from the cover and mammoth gigs, where their evident delight in playing live manifests itself in an inability to stop once they’ve started. There were moments during their headlining slot at this year’s Glastonbury when it seemed as if the only way Michael Eavis was going to get them offstage was with the aid of a bulldozer.

Related: Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl: ‘I got 6,000 muffins from Lionel Richie after missing Glastonbury’

The Guardian 60

The stadium rockers’ ninth album boasts impressive guests but few real departures from their trademark sound

Imagine all the world’s big rock bands adrift on a leaky raft. Supplies are low. Who’s shark bait? It’s a scenario sadly untestable in the field, but few rock fans would conceivably pick Foo Fighters over more divisive arena-fillers – Red Hot Chili Peppers, say, or U2.

Born from the ashes of Nirvana, but transformed into a juggernaut thanks to Dave Grohl’s grasp of melodics, the Foos are a reliable group who are hard to hate: power with tunes, good times with gravitas. For their ninth album, the first after a broken leg temporarily hobbled the irrepressible Grohl (“I feel the metal in my bones,” runs one wry lyric here), they have enlisted pop merchant Greg Kurstin (Adele, Katy Perry, Lily Allen; more recently, Liam Gallagher, Beck) to produce.

Drowned In Sound 40

It was March of last year when, plagued by rumours of an unlikely split, they released a YouTube video that shot down the suggestions in playful fashion whilst also poking fun at the idea that Dave Grohl might embark upon an ego-driven solo career. The thing is, as much as basically every other rock star under the sun would queue up to tell you what a thoroughly lovely bloke Grohl is, there was a potentially uncomfortable truth in that video.

Grohl is in charge, and this is his band. We saw that in the warts-and-all documentary, Back and Forth, that the group released in 2011 to promote their album Wasting Light, when he ushered ex-drummer William Goldsmith out of the back door in a manner less than dignified. We saw it three years ago when their last record, Sonic Highways, came out; it was pretty much an advert for the television series of the same name in which Grohl delved deep into the music scenes in eight major American cities. It’s worth noting that he was very much the face of the programme, but that it was the Foo Fighters who had their name attached to it.

He is Foo Fighters, and he’s a deeply image-conscious individual, and that’s why every one of the group’s records this past decade has had some sort of hook to it, some angle for the label’s publicity arm to work on in its promotion. The thinking behind Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace, their fabulously-titled 2007 LP that is by a distance their worst full-length, was that they would combine the two sides of their previous double album, In Your Honour, which had one rock disc and one acoustic disc. Grohl mentions, in Back and Forth, that this pioneering idea was floated to him by major label svengali Clive Davis.

Wasting Light, meanwhile, was real, man. The band cut it to tape in Grohl’s garage, which was genuinely admirable, but in terms of public perception, it suffered from the same problem as Echoes… before it. When ‘The Pretender’, a bona fide stadium rock classic, prefaced the record, we could never have known how milquetoast the rest of it would prove to be. Similarly, ‘White Limo’ was the first single out of the gate for Wasting Light, a ferocious, raw punk track that recalled their self-titled debut’s ‘Weenie Beenie’ and came with a riotous video that saw Lemmy driving the band around in the titular vehicle. Sadly, like ‘The Pretender’ before it, the song wrote cheques that the album failed to cash.

Speaking of Motörhead, Grohl’s take on this ninth Foo Fighters album, Concrete and Gold, is that to him it’s a close approximation of what would result if Lemmy had ever had his own go at recreating his beloved Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That is quite the claim, but Grohl’s nice-guy shtick is such that he always gets a pass on the sort of statements that, from anybody else’s mouth, would sound at best arrogant and at worst delusional. Sonic Highways was all over the place but had that cast-iron geographical excuse; even then, the fact that the lead single involved such a brazen take-off of Dio’s ‘Holy Diver’ spelled trouble early on, and sure enough, we ended up also with a ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ rip-off in the form of ‘What Did I Do?/God as My Witness’ and an identikit lighters-in-the-air moment with closer ‘I Am a River’.

The first misstep here is bringing in Greg Kurstin as producer. He’s as in-demand as any knob-twiddler on the planet and with good reason, but when his recent credits include Halsey’s kaleidoscopically colourful Hopeless Fountain Kingdom and Tegan & Sara’s poppier-than-thou Love You to Death - as well as clutches of tracks on the likes of the last Adele and Ellie Goulding albums - you have to wonder whether his was the first name that would’ve popped into Lemmy’s head when he was ready to go back into the studio.

The result is that Concrete and Gold is much more polished than anything that Motörhead might conceivably have put their collective name to, and when Grohl name-checks them, you can only assume he’s doing so with regard to pace; ‘Run’ and ‘Make It Right’ zip along with plenty of vigour, but both lack bite. On ‘La Dee Da’, which at least lyrically does not involve the Annie Hall references that the title implies, Alison Mosshart of The Kills is wasted in a background role, her vocals echoing Grohl’s anaesthetised screams, whilst listeners will rightly dread the mid-album lull in momentum on ‘Happy Ever After (Zero Hour)’ and ‘Sunday Rain’, both of which trudge.

In the end, it’s the lack of direction that’s fatal for Concrete and Gold; at least the last three records, scored through with problems as they were, had a sense of what was driving them, even if it was something as superficial as Sonic Highways’ city-hopping. Here, the tracks that were clearly written for arena audiences - ‘The Line’, for instance, or the title track - are very much by-the-numbers, and even where there might have been some visceral spark, it’s snuffed out by Kurstin’s clinical sonic treatment. Foo Fighters have long since been in that bracket, alongside the likes of U2 and Coldplay, where they can put together a ferocious enough setlist of hits that any new album is effectively rendered a curio, rather than a necessity. That doesn’t mean that they have to phone it in, though. What a shame that they did so anyway.