A shame to hear that Foo Fighters relied on the immovable rock structure so soon after the enjoyable, debut effort, but it was an inevitable change. May as well rip the band-aid off two albums into their cycle as a band, and that’s exactly what The Colour and the Shape does. Rock and roll is an ever-morphing experience, or at least that is what Foo Fighters suggest with the title of their second album. The colour, the shape, the feeling, all of it changes every time you engage with the genre. Or, at least, it should. Ever the influence on taste, Dave Grohl and the band carved out such a popular sound that everyone from the Kaiser Chiefs to Kings of Leon fell in line with Foo Fighters’ style. That’s not a problem until the bubble bursts, which it did some time ago. But there is a mass appeal to Foo Fighters’ work which has always been present.
My Hero and Everlong have done more for post-millennium rock and roll than many others. We can dance around it all we like, but as much as an album like Mirror Ball is better, there is no denying the influence. Foo Fighters had the formula nailed on their second album and it carried them through the charts for more than two decades. That much is impressive, commendable, even, but it does not make satisfying music. There are moments to The Colour and the Shape, pieces which feel like a completely different genre. Doll opens with such a softness to it, a sincerity to the fear heard within what becomes a drum heavy piece of rock and roll. Grohl is often scared to break from the standard of the genre, and that much is a real shame because, as he did on the Foo Fighters’ debut, he has a knack for finding the weirder, wilder charms of the genre. It’s the best minute of the album, the first, and the only time on The Colour and the Shape that we get a deeper look at Grohl’s songwriting.
Case in point, Monkey Wrench. Foo Fighters’ consistency is in the instrumental appeal, rather than the lyrical consistencies. What it means, though, is that without the right pacing for the tracklist, you’ve heard the fundamentals of the latter songs before getting there, such is the lack of difference from song to song. It doesn’t take long here, with the gap between Monkey Wrench and My Hero bereft of quality. A few grunge hang-ups appear on Wind Up but that feels more like nostalgia bait than anything else. Even My Hero, the anthemic classic piped through jukeboxes and speaker systems across the globe, has a weightlessness to it that lends itself to fodder material, rather than thoughtful musings or even a song suitable for losing yourself in. Follow-ups See You and Enough Space is far better for that.
Foo Fighters make it all too easy to get lost in comfortable noise, but while you sift through the likes of February Stars, it becomes clear that repetition of a formula is the winning style for Grohl. The Colour and the Shape remains steadfast in offering very few specifics, barely any moments that can truly gauge Grohl as a quality songwriter, as the first album did. Emotional simplicity is a hard sell, but rock and roll lends itself to that because all you need to do is make it loud, throw a few softer tracks in there, and hope that in the middle of all that, someone soundtracks their hardships with the songs at hand, hence the still viable love of Foo Fighters’ work. Having said that, Everlong is outstanding. It is a break from the formula set by the rest of the album, and had Grohl found it in him to write more like that, to pair the power pop with the grunge tones, then he’d have had a masterclass on his hands.
