We start today with today’s first song, and the first song for today is…
[Video]
[4.22]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: For the first fifteen years of their existence, Foo Fighters were a constantly shifting spirit of the alt rock charts. These shifts were not the massive journeys of reinvention that many of their peers undertook, but more slight modulations, Dave Grohl in the lab turning dials, one for power pop and the other for grunge. In their four albums since 2011’s Wasting Light, the dials broke. The second half of the Foo Fighters experience has been resoundingly one note, a mid-range classic rock power ballad pastiche doled out in four minute packages. Calling this “Today’s Song” feels like Grohl admitting defeat, giving up the conceit that any Foo Fighters song released since I was in middle school has had distinguishing characteristics at all.
[4]
Will Adams: I understand that part of the job as a songwriter is to come up with titles that are evocative and intriguing for the listener, but this would’ve been a lot more accurate if it were called “Today’s Slog.”
[4]
Andrew Karpan: Hard to think of these as songs, so much as the sound of three extended minutes of repeatedly lifting a lighter to the sky.
[5]
Nortey Dowuona: Remember when Dave Grohl was trying to curry favor by citing the Gap Band when his favorite drummer is Neil Peart? That was fun. Anyway, this is nice.
[5]
Ian Mathers: God, it’s almost worse that this isn’t actually that bad. I had to go pull up the “Monkey Wrench” video to remind myself there was a time where Dave Grohl made music I actually found exciting.
[4]
Claire Davidson: The problem with your average political—or, in this case, “political”—song is that their subject matter frequently requires more nuance than three or four minutes can allow, leading to songwriting that, though potentially cathartic, is typically both didactic and overly simplistic. “Today’s Song,” however, attempts to solve this problem by refraining from even being about anything, really, despite Dave Grohl’s opening declaration that he “woke up this morning screaming for change.” For all of this song’s exhortations to pick a side and make a decision, there’s very little urgency to its composition, as the Foo Fighters conjure a mid-tempo dirge more evocative of the grinding tedium of reading the news than the galvanized energy of street-level activism. This only further calls attention to the muddy low-end production that becomes particularly egregious during the song’s latter half, where the less dynamic guitar work of the second verse causes the percussion to intermittently bob through the mix. I will say that, if nothing else, Grohl’s delivery comes close to achieving whatever vision he had for this song, sounding at once stridently passionate and oddly serene in his sermonizing. He sounds confident that he, at the very least, is making the right choices. That he never specifies what those choices are, though, gives me ample room to disagree.
[5]
Katherine St. Asaph: You know, if you’d asked me 5 minutes ago, I’d have said it’d be great to have a song that’s all coda.
[2]
Taylor Alatorre: From Sonic Highways onward, every Foo Fighters release has been a strenuous effort to avoid what “Today’s Song” represents: an audible exhaustion with the very act of song creation, of half-heartedly rubbing driftwood together in the hopes of getting some salvific spark of novelty. It hasn’t always been successful, but there’s nobility in the effort, and even in their failures they retain a certain sense of unbowed honor: these are our limits, please accept them as we have. I can’t exactly bang or even nod my head to a sense of honor, though.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Yesterday’s band.
[5]