New Music Sunday ✧ Album of the Year ✧ 2011

Drum roll please...my Album of the Year is Wasting Light by the Foo Fighters. This album rocks. Blast it with the car windows down. Get crazy and play air guitar/drums with Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins. That right there should qualify it, huh? But behind the almost-metal rocking are many of the things I find in the pop albums: great vocal harmonies, melodic chord progressions, and tight recording/mixing. And one more thing: I really like Dave Grohl. If you weren't aware, Grohl was the drummer for Nirvana, and had to take a backseat to Kurt Cobain. With the Foo Fighters, Grohl became the lead man and he really owns it. Apparently he's a pretty down to earth guy too.

The Foo

The album Wasting Light is my favorite Foo Fighters LP to date. For me, there's just enough balance between the hard rock and the softer sections. More than any other Foo Fighters release I've heard, the sound is straightforward rock at the surface, but has the sophistication in musicianship and sonic production the best veteran bands develop after years of fine tuning their craft.

From Rolling Stone:

"Bridge Burning," which opens the record with insect-chatter guitars and Hawkins' avalanche rolls, is hellbent metal with a chrome-finish vocal hook. "Rope" has a chopped surge that evokes mid-Seventies Led Zeppelin, then straightens out for a later-vintage payoff: a ragged alt-rock glow with rough-boy harmonies. Wasting Light is also overdue confrontation: Grohl explicitly returning to a broken and still-painful past, for both inspiration and closure. The album reunites Grohl with producer Butch Vig, who worked on Nirvana's 1991 monster, Nevermind, and brings the same nuanced approach to weight and release here. And Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic plays on "I Should Have Known," a song that does not mention Cobain by name but reverberates with his consuming absence. "Didn't hear your warning/Damn my heart gone deaf," Grohl sings as the initial darkness – a solitary guitar and the quiet cutting guilt in his voice, set in inky reverb – slowly blows up to a purging rage: "No, I cannot forgive you yet/To leave my heart in debt." If you ever thought Foo Fighters were Nirvana-lite because Grohl lacked Cobain's torment, get ready to apologize."

Foo Fighters play for hours in concert

I didn't realize Wasting Light was produced by the same guy who did Nevermind. I also read that Grohl had a recording studio built in his Los Angeles house and made the album there. But the big revelation for me was made after reading this quote at live4ever.uk.com:

"Despite describing new album Wasting Light as the heaviest of their career, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has revealed legendary pop band Abba were a major influence during the recording of the album. “I like loads of crazy-ass, dissonant, distorted rock ‘n’ roll,” he told the Daily Star newspaper. “But I also love bands whose pop choruses get bigger and bigger. I love anthemic choruses, that overwhelming feeling of release that you can connect with.” Grohl also highlighted the work of The Bee Gees as another inspiration for Foo Fighters’ seventh studio album, which has been recorded with ex-Nirvana producer Butch Vig. Going further into the songwriting process which led to Wasting Light, Grohl added: “So whenever I thought I had a big enough chorus for a song, I would use that as the pre-chorus and then I would try and write something even bigger, like they did.”

Happy New Year Dave!

A-ha! I knew there was a reason my pop meter was going off when hearing this album. I guess Dave Grohl would be happy to hear that Abba's Super Trouper nearly made my top five this year. I had this album on cassette in the 80's, and got a digital copy this year that I listened to a lot. By the way, Grohl is not alone, as Porcupine Tree's Steven Wilson has also listed Abba as an influence.

If you want to check out the hardest rock ever influenced by a Swedish pop band, then open up Spotify and take a listen. Happy New Year! Let's hope there's some great new music on the horizon for 2012!

My Rating__9 out of 10         Headphones__ 7 out of 10