Foo Fighters, at the base of everything there are the songs

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the eighth studio album Foo Fighters, “Sonic highways”. An album with a particular realization: eight songs, each recorded in a different city, each influenced by the musical history of that city, each with a musical guest from that city, each the subject of an episode of a documentary directed by Dave GrohlHere is our review of that album by Foo Fighters.

How do you raise the bar higher, after being part of the most important rock band of the last 25 years and then starting another one that fills stadiums, has credibility to spare and never makes a mistake? Make a record like “Sonic Highways”.

You can almost imagine it, the band meeting in which the Foo Fighters sat down at a table to decide what to do for their 20-year career and their eighth album. Grohl saying “let’s make an experimental record? Nobody can tell us anything anyway” (puzzled faces of the other members). “Shall we re-record our first album?” “Dave, are you stupid?” (This really happened.) “There are: the thing that has amused me the most in recent years is “Sound city”. Why don’t we turn this record into a documentary? But not on a recording studio, on all of America.”

And so it went 8 songs, each recorded in a different city, each influenced by the musical history of that city, each with a musical guest from that city, each the subject of an episode of a documentary directed by Dave Grohl himself, broadcast in America on HBO (in Italy it will be on Sky Arte starting from November 12th). Once upon a time, when “post-modern” was in fashion, it was said that it was the era in which there were no longer great narratives, great stories capable of explaining the world. Post-modernity has gone out of fashion and is once again being talked about in a big way. With “Sonic highways” the Foo Fighters have created an enormous story, which aims to retrace the history of American music, in one place, a “Sound city” which includes all the sound citiesas on the album cover, which brings together all the metropolitan symbols in a collage in which the 8/infinity symbol dominates in the centre. Ambitious, yes. The bar is there, higher. But the Foo Fighters jump over it nimbly, and with style.

Because at the base of everything there are the songs. It’s not a soundtrack, maybe it’s not even a concept album. It is a collection of excellent songs, which pay homage to the roots of music, even in a not too obvious way: the links between places and songs are certainly not didactic. The Foo Fighters manage to be simultaneously ambitious and humble, without being presumptuous by placing themselves on the level of their heroes – which they could easily do, also because many of the groups mentioned in the documentary and involved in the project are apparently “minor”.

In the end, in these eight songs, the Foo Fighters sound like themselves and that’s it: “Congregation” is power pop of the best kind, “The feast and the famine” is that granite rock perfect for sending an arena or stadium into a tailspin .

Then, of course, they play with the sound references (the Californian jam of “Outside”, the horns of “In the clear”, which make the FF sound like the latest E Street Band). And they also play with the song form, allowing themselves deviations from the classical structure (the cavalcade of “Something from nothing”, the final suite of “Subterranean” and “I am a river”). But the general feeling is that they always have fun, that they never intellectualize, and always have the goal in mind: to entertain themselves, okay, but above all the listener. “Sonic highways” is a great, ambitious story, as we were saying. But even the greatest musical story deflates if there are no songs. And this, first of all, is a great rock record.