This came out in 2005 — or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
“I’m a revolving door,” sings Dave Grohl. “I’ve seen it all before.”
Don’t believe him? Check his résumé. For the past 15 years, Grohl has been one of the hardest-working — and hardest-rocking — men in music. As a singer-guitarist and frontman, he’s put out a handful of chart-topping, critically lauded discs with Foo Fighters. As a drummer, he’s backed everyone from Queens Of The Stone Age and Nine Inch Nails to Killing Joke. Just for a lark, he collaborated with heavy metal icons like Lemmy in the side project Probot. And oh yeah, he used to drum for some little band you might remember called Nirvana. So yeah, Grohl has seen and done it all — louder, faster and longer than plenty of his contemporaries.
Like many a chest-beating rocker, however, he also has his softer side. But unlike most guys who make a living screaming at the top of their lungs, Grohl has a decent touch with a ballad. Check out Nirvana MTV Unplugged or the acoustic section of the Foos’ Anywhere But Home DVD and see for yourself. Better yet, check out In Your Honor. Recorded over nine months in a giant warehouse studio the band built from scratch, this fifth disc from Grohl and co. is their most expansive (and doubtless their most expensive) work to date. But more importantly, with one disc of blistering rock and another of acoustic sensitivity, it’s a work that lets Dave stretch out and fully explore both sides of his personality.
Disc 1 is for the rockers. And if you’ve been hoping some of Grohl’s recent sideman forays into punk and metal would impact on his day job, you won’t be disappointed. This 10-song disc includes some of the heaviest material Foo Fighters have recorded. The guitars are more distorted. The grooves are faster and louder. The song structures and production lean a little more toward classic metal and punk than the shiny alt-rock of the band’s hits. And Grohl’s bloodcurdling vocals could give his old frontman a run for the money. It’s not that Grohl has abandoned all the qualities that made the Foos famous; it’s just that on tracks like No Way Back, In Your Honor, DOA, Free Me, the Crazy–Horse-on-steroids End Over End and the two-minute Hell (the best song Cheap Trick never wrote), he’s cut away all the soft bits, cranked what’s left to 10 and fed it all through a distortion pedal and a wall of Marshalls.
Disc 2 is where all those soft bits landed. The yin to Disc 1’s yang, the negative to its positive, these songs are some of the quietest, slightest and most intimate songs in Grohl’s catalogue. Bittersweet melodies, melancholy lyrics, quiet arrangements, unhurried performances and dark textures are the main ingredients on these 10 acoustic cuts. Guest spots also abound. Norah Jones croons a duet with Dave on the breezy samba Virginia Moon. QOTSA’s Josh Homme repays his sideman debt with a brooding guitar line on the folksy Razor. Led Zeppelin icon John Paul Jones drops by to tinkle some piano and pluck some mandolin. And most prominently, the spectre of Kurt Cobain haunts Friend Of A Friend in its lazily strummed chords, croaky vocal and lyrics about a boy who “says nevermind” and “needs a quiet room with a lock to keep him.” It is easily the most moving cut on the disc, if only because we know exactly who Grohl is talking about — and can hear the burden he clearly still bears in lines like “When he tells his two best friends ‘I think I drink too much’ / No one speaks.” It is a moment every bit as powerful as any blood-curdling scream on Disc 1.
Indeed, either one of these discs would be a superior Foo Fighters disc on its own. Together, they’re easily the most revealing and significant achievement of his post-Nirvana career. Not bad for a guy who’s seen it all before.
