The "Foo Fighters" album with the long name "Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace" was released on September 25, 2007, which means we have a review for you...
So let's start with a quote from Dave Grohl whose context you will discover at the end:
"Welcome to the greatest fucking day of my whole entire life!"
The Foos' sixth album was released in 2007 two years after the album "In Your Honor" which will have a very big impact on this album. After the release of the album "In Your Honor", the band went on a tour that combined two performances, day after day in the same location, one electric performance, and one acoustic performance. This is the first time that the band has added various instruments and other musicians to the quartet on stage and you can see this amazing combination in the digital copy of the show called "Skin & Bones".
This addition opened up the horizons (and chakras) of the band members and gave them a musical experience they had not experienced before. Dave did not believe it was possible to combine so much and play so many instruments in the Foo's songs. Not to forget that this is also the band's fifth album, so the maturity is also reflected here and indeed you hear a clear influence of this line in the album.
(Photo: Thomas Rabsch)
The process of writing the album was very interesting, it may have started as every Foos album begins, with Dave sitting down with Taylor Hawkins to write the skeletons and demos for the songs on the album, but it is evolving in a beautiful and different direction.
This time, too, Dave recruited producer Gil Norton, who produced one of the biggest albums with the band
Her "The Colour And The Shape". After he composed about 40 songs with Taylor he sat down with Gil and together they put the structure of the songs and cut out the unnecessary parts so that they were left with 20 songs. He brought these songs to the rest of the members and for two months the whole band together worked on the songs (including Pat Smear who came back from a long break and was included in the song "Let It Die").
Every day they worked on one song, from noon to evening. Change, experience, critique, and create together. Taylor claimed it was the first time Dave had faced criticism for the songs he wrote in real-time in front of everyone. Dave said that when they finished working on all the songs they were more cohesive and united than ever.
Before touching the music we need to pay some attention to the lyrics. In one of the reviews on the album, Stephen Thomas Erlewine (AllMusic) claimed that Dave invests all his sense of humor in the band's music videos, in his collaborations with Queens of the Stone Age, or in the music videos he makes with Tenacious D and for his albums he leaves nothing, 100% serious !!
In this album, the matter is much more prominent. Apart from the song "Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make Up Is Running)" written with humor, the rest are songs with serious lyrics, about love, life, and the like. Perhaps this can be attributed to the birth of his daughter Violet at that time. The transition from alcohol-laden nights and parties into the nights replaced by diapers and feeding, in any case, significant and heavier texts are felt here.
In terms of the music itself, there is no very big change from the band's previous albums, no refreshing innovation or musical diversity. Perhaps the only thing you feel on this album in this respect is the melody, it feels like the band puts a lot of emphasis on melody and every song is played to it in a very structured and melodic way. Yes, we repeated the word melody, we know !! You will not find here sudden breaks, a change in rhythm, or a combination of different and strange rhythms.
But what is there in this album and it is a very prominent feature... it is extremism. It moves you from side to side, once firmly and once gently, once throws you up and once gently lays you on the floor. If you took the album and split it in two, a bit like "In Your Honor" you would get on one side stadium songs like: "The Pretender" that opens the album (and a sheer delight to the drummers), the shaky "Erase / Replace", "Long Road to Ruin" with one of the most beautiful and funny clips, the excellent "Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make Up Is Running)" and a few more.
On the other hand you would get tender ballads like: "Let It Die", "Come Alive", the masterful "Stranger Things Have Happened" with the metronome in the background, ballad of the "Beaconsfield Miners" inspired by two miners involved in the collapse of the mine in Tanzania in 2006 and the same he plays with Katherine "Kaki" King who is a virtuoso American guitarist who accompanies Dave with the fingerpicking technique and of course also "Statues" squeezing tears.
This is what sets this album apart, it is simply a combination of the two popular Rock ends. Aggressiveness and madness in the face of ballads and softness. Therefore he adapts himself or you adapt yourself to him.
At the 2008 Grammys, this album earned Foos 5 different nominations and won two of them, Best Rock Album and Best Hard Rock Performance. If we are not mistaken then in this event Dave said over the Grammy stage that they get the award because there are simply no other rock bands. This of course was directed against the organizers of the event and not against the bands.
This album has a significant impact on our lives and how it has accompanied us for a long time therefore it is remembered by us very, very strongly. Its beauty is precisely in these extreme situations that take you from side to side and you choose the side that suits you according to your mood and what you are going through at that moment.
So do not feel obligated to listen to the album from beginning to end, but click on Shuffle and let it surprise you !!
Listen to: Spotify, Apple Music
Just a moment... what about the quote ??? So...
After the release of the album, in October 2007 the band went on a tour to promote the album. Following on from this tour, the Foos held one of the biggest performances in their history at Wembley Stadium on June 7, 2008. A performance that can also be found as a digital copy. They hosted Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin and after they got off stage and before the encore performed, the excited Dave couldn't resist and just roared the sentence we quoted, "This is the biggest day of my life !!!"
In 2020, the band fully uploaded the show to YouTube, so feel free to see it for yourself: