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Into thin air

Foo Fighters are happy to be so sad

by Stephanie Zacharek

[Foo Fighters] After the uncorked exhilaration of Foo Fighters' homonymous 1995 debut, the band's follow-up, The Colour and the Shape (Roswell/Capitol, in stores May 20), is like the moment of reserved quiet after a squall. If Foo Fighters' bracing sound was a call to arms -- or a "call to all our past resignations" -- The Colour and the Shape is a sound poem about the first 45 minutes after the last rallier has gone home. There's nothing left but some slightly crumpled idealism and a massive clean-up job. Revolutions -- even mini-rock-and-roll ones -- are messy things.

Yet it's the reflectiveness and the relative quiet of The Colour and the Shape that make it a triumph. The "band" behind Foo Fighters on the first album was essentially Dave Grohl, the former drummer for Nirvana, singing and playing almost all the instruments; additional members Pat Smear (on guitar), Nate Mendel (on bass), and William Goldsmith (on drums) joined later, and this is the line-up that puts the spark in The Colour and the Shape (Goldsmith has since left and been replaced by Taylor Hawkins).

It's tempting to call The Colour and the Shape a more mature-sounding album -- even the noisiest guitars have a burnished sound, as if their fuzz had been faintly polished -- but it isn't boring for a moment. In fact, it's breathtakingly passionate, operatic in its scope and mood. Grohl sings of love affairs smashing apart, falling to pieces, coming back together for a magic moment or two. These are affairs that were doomed from the start, but so alluring and intense that their participants had no choice but to run with them: to burn themselves out like crazed moths slam-dancing against a Japanese lantern.

You hear traces of that frustration from the first track, "Doll," a ballad that opens with Grohl singing Rudy Vallee-style as if through a megaphone. The effect should be a conceit, but it's more of a signal -- a way of establishing how distant the singer feels from his beloved, or even from his own feelings. "You know in all of the time that we shared/I've never been so scared/Doll me up in my bad luck/I'll meet you there," Grohl sings, regret and bewilderment hanging over his words like the tired boughs of a weeping willow. There's another idea implicit in the song -- that bad luck is a place you go to, an event you dress up for, like a dinner party. You can find yourself there all too easily, even if you're sure you've followed all the signs and taken all the right turns.

Starting with "Doll" and working its way toward the closer, "New Way Home" ("I felt like this on my way home/I'm not scared"), The Colour and the Shape diagrams advance and retreat, like the map of an old Civil War battleground, but it's the advance and retreat of love. The landmarks are ticked off by the CD's shifting, contrasting textures: on songs like "Monkey Wrench" and "Wind Up," the big, overlapping guitars of Grohl and Smear scrimmage and scramble around each other like feuding siblings working toward some kind of harmonic truce, and they always manage to find it. (Producer Gil Norton, probably best known for his work with the Pixies, gives them just the right amounts of buzz and sheen.)

But Foo Fighters know that you don't necessarily need a big sound to get a big effect. The slap-and-tickle acoustic guitars on "See You" generate their own electricity. "Up in Arms" starts as a pensive ballad and rolls out like a fireball, and the guitars and the lyrics work in both modes. "The rain is here and you my dear are still my friend," Grohl sings, as if he hardly dared believe it; he seems to hang back in the protection of the shade-dappled guitars. But before you can barely take a breath, you hear a long, slow whistle and those guitars turn into champion kickboxers, or maybe sassy razorbacks. Although Grohl sings the same words with what sounds like a new resolve, you can't help catching the slight edge of doom in his voice. This is a reconciliation that isn't going to take. "Together now, I don't know how this love could end," he asserts, as if the sudden enthusiasm of the guitars had given him a rush. The key is, he wants to believe it. The tragedy is, he can't.

That hopelessness haunts The Colour and the Shape, but it also gives the album a lush depth; even the most restless, rockingest guitar riffs seem layered over with a gauzy kind of beauty. "I was joking that the cover should be just a picture of a therapist's couch," Grohl has said of the album. "The way it's worked out is just really weird. And it's liberating. The lyrics are like my therapist's note pad." But The Colour and the Shape at least explores an exhilarating kind of unhappiness. It's fully aware that misery gives off its own heat and energy. You can hear this in the crooked chord changes on the chorus of "Monkey Wrench." They take strange little twists and turns, as if unsure of their own direction, and yet the guitars ultimately take off like a tiger shooting out of the jungle. There's a heap of confidence behind the song's uncertainty.

What's more, The Colour and the Shape is one of the most beautifully paced albums I've heard this year, working its way forward in passion and intensity. "Walking After You," the song before the CD's closer, is a ballad shaped by a luminous acoustic guitar and the soft shimmer of cymbals. "Tonight I'm tangled in my blanket of clouds, dreaming aloud," Grohl sings. It's half-resolution, half-resignation -- his voice is a half-whisper. "Things just won't do without you, matter of fact/I'm on your back." The line is impossibly tender and wistful, but it also reads like a response to an accusation -- as if someone had rejected you in the worst possible way ("Get off my back," she might have said), and you just couldn't walk away.

You could think of "Walking After You" as the natural continuation of "Everlong," the song before it, as just another way of refusing to let go of something -- or someone -- you love. "Everlong" opens with staccato guitar notes that are like a telegraphed message, and then Grohl -- as if he'd been waiting in the wings, screwing up his courage -- steps in to fill in the words: "Hello, I've waited here for you/Everlong." "Everlong" is about wanting to hang on for as long as you can, beyond all reason, to a feeling or a moment that's slipping through your fingers. Grohl sings, " `And I wonder when I sing along with you/If everything would ever feel this real forever/If anything'd ever be this good again/The only thing I'll ever ask of you, you gotta promise not to stop when I say when,' she sang." You don't realize until the end of this last line that he's singing in the third person, quoting someone who's said something he's still trying to wrap his mind around.

"Everlong" may be a song about the last embers of romance, or it may be a song about the end of a live show -- about the feeling you sometimes get, wanting the music to go on forever, no matter that it's closing in on 2 a.m. and you're exhausted. "Breathe out, so I can breathe you in," Grohl says, as if he were looking for a kind of sustenance beyond mere oxygen. Fuck air. All you need is love, the Beatles once said, a touch ironically. With The Colour and the Shape, Grohl and company buy into that and just keep breathing deeply, no matter how thin the air around them gets. They're crazy -- but they're fearless, too.

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