I’m Finished Making Sense, Done Pleading Ignorance

On my iPod I have a playlist called Heart Pumpers, and much like the title suggests it is full of songs whose main purpose is to get the blood flowing while on a run, exercising or getting ready for a competition. Featured in this playlist are multiple songs from the Foo Fighters including My Hero, All My Life and Best of You. I may just have to add the band’s latest single, The Pretender which in no way embodies the characteristics of the album’s title, Echo, Silence, Patience & Grace, with its crushing guitars and unconformist lyrics that could get anyone ready to go into battle after melodic start of song.

The guitars don’t get turned down after the bombast of The Pretender as it is followed by a few more straight ahead rockers that should get plenty of play on rock radio over the next year including Let it Die and Erase/Replace. It is then almost a relief when the more melodic Long Road to Ruin, think a pessimistic version of Times Like These, shows up. From there the album goes back and forth between songs that would be on opposite disks of the double album In Your Honor and definitely benefits from the blend over the previous outing.

There are some curveballs on the album including the tongue in cheek title of Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make Up Is Running) that takes pot shots at the emo bands that dominated radio the past years. Of course Dave Grohl and company are having the last laugh as they are still relevant as the emo fad seems to be fading. But the oddest of them all is Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners written by Grohl after meeting a survivor of the mine’s collapses and swore to him he would record the song and being a man of his word, here it is. Some might complain the finger picking instrumental but it is a good diversion for the album.

What is missing from Echo, Silence, Patience & Grace a slowed down more poppier song in vein of Big Me, Walking After You, or Next Year. There are some attempts here but Stranger Things Have Happened, Summer’s End and the album closer Home just fall short of the greatness of previous tracks except But, Honestly with its slow build to an all out rocker. They do try to switch it up a little with a song like Statues which sounds like an American response to the British Invasion of the sixties. But the second half of the album as a whole just suffers from not having any songs to connect to.

Song to Download - The Pretender

Echo, Silence, Patience & Grace gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.