Concrete and Gold

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.