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In Your Honor

Dave Grohl and his Foo Fighters clan released their fifth album, In Your Honor, yesterday. 20 songs are spread across two discs and one disc has all rockers and the other disc has softer, mostly acoustic material. Though I've only listened to the whole album once, I think it's pretty strong.

My biggest complaint about the band's previous album, One By One, was that it was all rawk. Even the slower songs are big rockers. As evidenced on all of the other Foo Fighters records, the band showed that they could also be pretty and melodic. This softer side was jettisoned on One By One and I missed it.

Dividing up the softer and rockier material for In Your Honor sounded like yin and yang before I heard it. I thought you could make one solid disc of material. However, after actually listening to the whole record, I think the album works as two discs.

One main dynamic per disc may be a test of the listener's patience, but almost all of the the material is strong enough to go beyond this base. If you tried to combine tracks from both discs on one disc, the flow would be all over the place and inconsistent. Both discs are rather short (10 tracks per disc) and they feel like two separate albums.

Congrats to the Foos for creating another solid record. Also, congrats to the band for not changing their line-up for this record (like almost every record before).

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