This is not so much a return for the Foo Fighters as it is a reminder of their previous launches. An anniversary track and then a one-off song, which felt like it would’ve been followed up with more material, can be found in the weeks before Your Favourite Toy was released. The title track of their new album ushers in a new era, three years on from, arguably, their strongest album to date. Not their most memorable, of course, but certainly the strongest themes the band has managed to cobble together. Whether Dave Grohl and company can do so again after a handful of line-up changes, some chosen, others shocking, is yet to be heard. Your Favourite Toy gets the band off the ground again after two failed launches. Well, not failed, a measly celebratory showcase which sounded like a congested blur of all their songs to date, and a song which wasn’t quite strong enough to feature on the upcoming album. Still, the first song from this new Foo Fighters era makes a statement.
What that statement is depends on what you want from the Grohl-fronted band thirty years on from their inception. A sub-three-minute song to announce, for the third time, is quite the choice. But the band believes this is the new sound worth pursuing. It suggests the previous two are left over from studio sessions, which led no further than the sound which the band had trotted out for decades. Finally, after years of having to pretend he had more to say with his lyrics, more to show off with his instrumental style, Grohl has boiled down rock and roll to childish chants and the sort of distortion you’d expect from an old school television set fizzing into life. He’s channelling The Stooges without the feral carnage expected of the genre, a shouty and loud proclamation with no message. He’s not even preaching to the converted anymore; Grohl is just yelling his way into the warmth of dad rock.
But where the likes of Kaiser Chiefs and Stereophonics can offer the occasional surprise, it sounds as though Foo Fighters as a project has reached the end of the line. Your Favourite Toy has the post-reunion Pixies problem. There’s a real chance here to create something different with the feedback and energetic performance, which cannot be mistaken as anything but genuine, but how Grohl writes his way through this short return is abysmal. Foo Fighters are hardly remembered for their lyrical sense, but there is, at the very least, some level of effort in their greatest hits. The “na na na” chants which open and close this would-be rocker sound pumped full of energy but lacking in any real reason. They fail to continue the explosiveness promised by the instrumental build.
Your Favourite Toy is the sort of rock stock Foo Fighters had, wisely, departed from with But Here We Are. Their daring choices there, the reflection of being a band for so long and the honesty which prevailed are now lost. Whether it’s personal circumstances, the end of grief as the lead tone, or just a want to try something new, it doesn’t matter. They’ve traded in some welcome momentum for the sound they had conquered in the early 2000s. A return to their roots is the last thing they needed, especially when such roots have been dug up, paved over, and scrapped. Picking out what they can of a previous sound, Foo Fighters find themselves doing very little with their wordplay, even less with the instrumental simplicity, and start to inflate a new echo chamber of plodding rock and roll.
