Under doctor's orders: Foo Fighters' Medicine At Midnight

Full disclosure: this is the first time I’ve ever attempted to review a Foo Fighters album, and I’m somewhat apprehensive. Not because there are people I know who worship the very ground “ver Foos” walk on, or because I have friends who loathe the very idea of the band. No, it’s because they’re a bona fide rawk-and-roll group who, on an interplanetary scale, are gargantuan and yet still hard to know where they are pitched. 

They’ve been with us for more than 25 years, releasing ten albums in that time, a length of service and respondent following that is comparable with the great legends of classic heavy rock whose DNA clearly courses through the Foos’ veins. They are a Major Stadium Band, with Dave Grohl generally thought of as the Nicest Man In Rock™. Some fans lust after him, others just want to hang out with him in the blokey sense. Indeed such is Grohl's avuncularity - and, indeed, that of all six Foos - that he can eff-and-blind his way through gigs and still have grannies digging him, even the songs on which he screams his vocals. 

There is, then, something polished about the Foo Fighters. Yes, the music has an edge, but it’s cultivated. If you turn down the volume a notch, they offer comfortable rock and roll, ideal for mass arm-waving summer festival singalongs. The brothers Gallagher would probably baulk at this, but at times the Foo Fighters' music resembled an Americanised Oasis. In some respects they are the Three Bears of rock - the bowl of porridge that is 'just' right. But there is a nagging sense with me of ‘So what?’. Nice band, a few catchy daytime rock radio staples, but nothing artistically groundbreaking. Like the Volkswagen Golf, nicely designed, superbly constructed and brilliantly executed, but, you know…

Which begs the question: will their new album, Medicine At Midnight, do anything for the doubters or, equally, for the already confirmed? Well, let’s start with its premise. Grohl says that, for their tenth album and 25th anniversary (last year, when they were originally intending to release it), they wanted to do something different. “When you look back at all the records we've made in the last 25 years, it's like 'OK, we've done the noisy punk rock crap... We've done the sleepy acoustic stuff...,” Grohl explained to Radio.com. “We've done the three-and-a-half minute-long, fun pop-rock song. Hard rock, heavy stuff...‘What's the one thing we haven't done?’. I was like, ‘You know we haven't made our David Bowie's Let's Dance record. We haven't made the Stones' Tattoo You or, like, a Power Station record. We haven't made a rock band record that you could shake your ass to.”

So, instead of making some mellow AOR record, Grohl thought they’d make a party album. “A lot of our favourite records have these big grooves and riffs,” he told the NME. “I hate to call it a funk or dance record, but it’s more energetic in a lot of ways than anything we’ve ever done and it was really designed to be that Saturday night party album.” Wait - a party album? Well, yes. “It was written and sequenced in a way that you put on, and nine songs later you’ll just put it on again,” says Grohl. So let’s see if that’s the outcome. 

When it was released in November, lead-in single Shame Shame gave some hint at Medicine At Midnight’s direction of travel, with its pizzicato strings, bass riff and Taylor Hawkins’ hi-hat-heavy drum pattern seemingly drawing on the aforementioned Power Station. It is, however, arguably the album's weakest track, and for all its pleasantry, doesn’t really represent the party vibe Grohl speaks of. Far better is the track preceding it, Making A Fire which kicks off the album with a bright blast of happy-clappy, na-na-na-na-chorused drive up Pacific Coast Highway on a gloriously sunny day.

When it does come, the Bowie reference is not immediately obvious. Midway through the album, the title track opens up with an ambience that does indeed appear to emulate that of the sonics found on Let's Dance. By the time of its funk-blues guitar solo, which bears a strong resemblance to Stevie Ray Vaughan's on the Bowie hit, the reference is complete. You can sort of seeing where Grohl is coming from, even if it's also a good soundbite on his part. The better reference point, in my opinion, is indeed The Power Station, that mid-80s supergroup formed by Duran Duran’s Andy Taylor and John Taylor with Robert Palmer and Tony Thompson, the former Chic drummer, working with producer Bernard Edwards, who co-created Chic with - guess who? - Nile Rodgers, Bowie's arch-collaborator on Lets Dance. Perhaps now I get it, but it would be a stretch to say that Bowie/Rodgers' influence courses through the sonic framework of the album as a whole. Cloudspotter might have a trace about it, but only a trace, and Making A Fire does contain some funk chops (Grohl says it's rooted in Sly & The Family Stone).

However, this album is not a discoification of the Foo Fighters’ stock-in-trade. For the most part, Medicine At Midnight it grown-up heavyish rock, with plenty of riffing by the guitar triumvirate of Grohl, Pat Smear and Chris Shiflett. Holding The Poison is almost Foo-by-numbers. There are mellower moments, such as Chasing Birds and the gently reflective Waiting On A War, which recalls the shared childhood of, I think, all of us who grew up in the shadow of nuclear threat. Coming four tracks in, it diverts from the party spirit somewhat, but affords the opportunity Grohl to expound on the modern-day risk of global conflict, a thought triggered by his daughter one day while out in the car. It does, however, evolve into the closest thing on this record to the bombastic stadium stompers that blasted them into rock’s top tier to begin with. In similar vein there’s No Son Of Mine (no, not a Genesis cover…), apparently a tribute to the late Lemmy of Motörhead and, yes, it does resemble Ace of Spades, a song which, if you think about it, actually provides part of the Foo Fighters' original blueprint.

There is no known music lore that dictates how long any album should be: Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece What’s Going On clocks in at 35 minutes; Elton John’s classic early 70s trio of Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across The Water and Honky Château all ran to no more than three-quarters of an hour apiece; the record for shortest album is probably still held by The Beach Boys’ Wild Honey, a miserly 23 minutes and 58 seconds. So, at 37 minutes long, it’s hard to see what kind of party Grohl had in mind when he cast Medicine At Midnight as the soundtrack of a romping night in. But, then, given modern attention spans, an album you can listen to in the time it takes for my lunchtime constitutional is not that unusual. “So we picked the nine songs that we really enjoyed and thought, ‘Great.’ Okay, it’s 37 minutes,” he recently told The Irish Times, pointing out that to his teenage daughter “37 minutes would be like Gandhi or War And Peace.”

So, to describe the Foo Fighters' celebration of a quarter-century as a functioning musical entity as some sort of liberating milestone would be a misnomer. But you can see what Dave Grohl means. He also knows that the band could, simply, keep on pumping out clones of My Hero or Best Of You, just to keep their hardcore fans happy. In truth, Medicine At Midnight doesn’t stray all that far from the formula, but nor does it slip on trademark quality. This band may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s nothing here that’s really not to like. And right now, that’s no bad thing.