My Review of Foo Fighters' Wasting Light

This will be on my May Update of my website........



Wasting Light is the Foo Fighters' 2011 offering to its rabid adoring fans and to the nay sayers and haters. Before they started previewing portions of the album on the social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc it was said that this would be the Foo Fighters' heaviest album to date. I have to say that I disagree strongly with that. In my opinion this is not a the heaviest album by the Foos. If I had to choose an album from their catalog that was their heaviest I think that honor would go to their last album "Echos, Silence, Patience & Grace". However Wasting Light is a typical Foo Fighters album which means its a good album. Its a mix of melody and harmonic songs with its fair share of the heavy stuff with Dave screaming his vocal chords to shreds. What I like about this album is that Butch Vig produced this album. For those hardcore fans of Nirvana he was the guy who produced Nevermind, not to mention he is the drummer of the band Garbage. I was very excited when I first read that he was going to be the producer.

This album has a few noteables first of all it sees the return of Pat Smear back to the lineup. Pat Smear is one of the Original members of the band and left shortly after the second album. However Pat remained as a touring musician and now he is back to being an official member of the band. So The Foo Fighters are 5 guys 3 guitarists in the lineup. Seems kind of unusual but I'm cool with it. So you should be too. Another noteable is on the song "I Should Have Known" has another Nirvana alumni on bass and acorddian, Yes I am talking about Krist Novoselic. So imagine this, when doing that song, you got the guy who produced Nevermind, and 3 former members of Nirvana. That is the closest we can ever get to a Nirvana reunion. RIP Kurt. Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü fame plays guitar and does background vocals on "Dear Rosemary". Another noteable about this album is that it was recorded in Analog and upon its release they included a piece of the tape used to make the album. However Butch Vig had commented on an MTV Interview that it was all analog until it got to the Post-Mastering phase of the album.

Upon several listens of the albums I have come to like Rope, Dear Rosemary, I Should Have Known, Arlandria, Back & Forth When the Foo Fighters put out an album I normally can find anywhere from 4 songs and up that I like. This album is no exception. Of course I bought the Deluxe version of the album which came with a bonus CD with a remix of Rope (Deadmau5 mix) which in my opinion completely changes the tempo and feel of the song. It sounds almost like a dance mix. On the bonus cd it contrained a few videos one of "Walk" Live from the Roxy and the music video for "White Limo", which I believe has Motorhead's Lemmy in the video. What I liked about the bonus CD is an unreleased track called "Better Off" its a good song but I can see why it was left off the album it did not seem to fit with the other songs on this album. All in all I am going to give this a 9 for a rating out of a possible 10 because while it is a Foo Fighters album and I do like about half the songs on the album it did not quite grab me in the same way their first two albums did. I do enjoy this album its a nice new offering from one of my all time favorite bands and I am glad that their Hiatus wasn't for too long.