Concrete and Gold

The Foo sextet has made its hardest, yet most curvaceous and warm-blooded record to date. [No. 148, p.54]

Concrete and Gold is easily the finest album of the Foo Fighters’ 20-plus year recording career, an artistic breakthrough that hopefully marks the start of an exciting new era in the band’s continued musical odyssey.

A record that features some of the band’s most vital and impressive tracks in years.

If you're expecting an album full of immediate anthems like Monkey Wrench and All My Life, dig out their Greatest Hits. Otherwise, bask in this hour of masterful '70s-flavoured jams. [9 Sep 2017, p.50]

The finished product is actually more like AC/DC having a crack at making their White Album, in that it’s as varied, expansive and crammed with drug-crusted invention as a band embedded in blues and hard rock can get. For a record relatively light on pop-rock stadium slayers, it’s also easily the Foos’ most elemental album yet.

In conception and execution, Concrete And Gold stands as Foo Fighters' most beguiling record to date. [Oct 2017, p.88]

Grohl and company could have continued to make mundane arena rock. That they’ve managed to hunker down and create a collection that proves that they aren’t ready crawl fade away just yet.

It packs plenty of the expected, full-throttle thrills, but there's more interesting, atypical action on winding, low-slung jam "The Sky Is A Neighborhood" and the six-minutes-plus of "Sunday Rain." [Nov 2017, p.26]

What really sets Concrete and Gold aside from the rest is that you don’t feel this one has been written with stadiums specifically in mind.

Grohl and his pals never set out to write the gospel on modern rock--they only sought to preach it, hammering it into our heads by way of biting hooks and anthemic melodies. There’s more than enough red meat to go around on Concrete and Gold, the band’s ninth album.

Musically and emotionally, Concrete and Gold is their most balanced record yet.

Foo Fighters show that they're in love with light and shade, fury and quiet, every twist and turn they can make with their instruments, and even if Concrete And Gold isn't about much more than that, it's refreshing to hear the Foos embrace to the logical flashing conclusion of Grohl's allegiance to real rock values.

After remaining stagnant for so long, Concrete and Gold is a mini breakthrough for the Foo Fighters. Progress, at last.

Mr. Grohl and Foo Fighters wear their influences so openly--Pink Floyd in “Concrete and Gold,” Led Zeppelin in “Make It Right,” the Beatles all over the album--that they still come across as earnest, proficient journeymen, disciples rather than trailblazers.

Grohl’s music has cried out for, well, coloring and shaping for so long that it matters more that he’s finally sculpted an objet d’art, rather than Another Foo Fighters album.

Once it settles the textures of a solid, workmanlike rock and roll album reveal themselves.

There are boring Foo Fighters albums and pretty good ones; C&G is a pretty good one, and in two years there will probably be another.

For the most part of Concrete and Gold, it's the same anthemic, meat 'n' potatoes arena rock we've come to expect; a little more punk or metal aggression here, a little more acoustic balladry there, but the mould is the same.

While there’s nothing that will diminish their legacy or standing in rock music, there’s very little material that pushes the band forward either.

Concrete and Gold is an ambitious and entertaining album. But when it comes to a comparison with Sergeant Pepper, it doesn’t earn its stripes.

Grohl and co are on point, the tracklist has girth and depth. What Concrete and Gold lacks, perhaps, is actual concrete: fresh, modern, risky architecture, rather than Beatles tributes.

Foo Fighters’ ninth is, then, more interesting than one might’ve expected.

La Dee Da has a welcome edge, with a slightly sarcastic feel reminiscent of Grohl’s stint a few years back with Queens Of The Stone Age, and Dirty Water is a competent bit of mid-tempo, mid-intensity, mid-everything stadium rock, as indeed is pretty much the rest of this polished album.

It’s an album that won’t frighten the horses, but provides enough fresh interest to keep the band ticking over: for the Foo Fighters, you suspect, that means mission accomplished.

When they stray from their core heavy rock duties, there’s an Oasis-like magpie quality to the songs, be it the way that the acoustic harmony-pop of “Happy Ever After (Zero Hour)” recalls ‘60s pop trifle “Sitting On A Fence”, or the way Dave Grolsch’s Lennon-esque inflection on “Sunday Rain” is winkingly set within guitar and dynamics echoing Abbey Road’s “I Want You”.

Concrete And Gold is a straightforward Foo Fighters album, albeit one that does occasionally fulfill its promise to deliver both aural lavishness and maximum heaviosity. [Oct 2017, p.102]

Sure, the lyrics are better, the songs aren’t quite as boring, but it’s becoming harder and harder to defend this band on the charge of being dad rock.