They’re falling apart to halftime…
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[3.17]
Alfred Soto: See: Jam, Pearl; Dylan, Bob; synthesizers, geezers too late.
[3]
Thomas Inskeep: When did Foo Fighters become a less interesting version of the Killers?
[3]
Vikram Joseph: When a rock band tries something experimental (TM) after 25 years of putting out broadly the same thing, it’s more than likely a sign that they’re becoming increasingly aware of their own commercial mortality; if it was borne out of any real creative drive they would probably have done it earlier. This is particularly apparent on the crushingly dull “Shame Shame,” where twitching bass and plinky strings serve as metaphor for the dying spasms of a band who’ve outstayed their useful lifespan. The chorus acquiesces to something more melodic, but is no less dreary. If you’re going to be a relic, at least do it on your own terms.
[2]
Tim de Reuse: You so rarely hear a bassline that is distractingly bad; the human ear has such an affinity for repetition that nearly anything can serve as a track’s backbone if you just tire out the part of the brain that objects to it. Under no tonal interpretation does this five-note disaster either resolve or lift off from a satisfying place. Indeed, its puritanical anti-syncopation makes it feel like it’s coming to an abrupt halt every bar even as it never moves at all. The rock nothings that comprise the rest of the track provide no distraction; the sparsity of the instrumentation highlights the feathery rhythm section a bit too much. It’s a dead groove. It can’t dance. If it were a person, it’d clap on the one and the three.
[1]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Ten years ago these guys released Wasting Light and I loved it, because I was a middle schooler with a very limited window of what good contemporary music was. In the decade since, they’ve done a lot to make middle school me seem even less cool than I was, devolving into even more rigid classic rock pastiche. “Shame Shame” is the first thing I’ve heard from Grohl & Company since seventh grade that has made me feel something other than boredom, a taught faux-goth track that does more than just go through the motions of “being a Foo Fighters song.” It shows off the best parts of the post-“The Pretender” formulation of the band, balancing busy drum patterns and pro forma distorted power chords with the surprising emphatic range that Grohl still has — he sounds great whether he’s in spooky whisper-voice or belting modes. It’s a single reminiscent to the Usher comeback singles from this year, a reformulation of what worked in the ’90s and 2000s that doesn’t change much because it doesn’t really have to.
[7]
Austin Nguyen: Being the English major that I am, I love seeing the lyrics to a song written out beneath a music video. On one hand, these words were never meant to be read in isolation; they were meant to be rapped or sung, just one thread that makes up the greater tapestry of a song. But seeing them alone, merely black text on a white backdrop, somehow makes it more potent at times, as if when the dust of the synths or piano or whatever instrumentation settles, however temporary, these words will still be here, for you to carry on the song yourself, which can make an amazing song even better or, in the case of “Shame Shame,” a bad song worse. For such a seemingly visceral feeling, the Foo Fighters sound window-shoppingly pedestrian: the vague outline of a one-night stand that a seventh-grader could’ve workshopped (“Be the tongue that will swallow you” is more endocytosis than sexual excitement), the heavy-handed drums and diphthong-milking glides that’ve been on clearance for three years, the “sun”/”moon”isms that feel budgeted for Pinterest rather than a pang of guilt. “Put that record on,” Grohl sings; Note: It doesn’t have to be his.
[3]