Wasting Light
RCA/ Arista *

God, stop the lights. And the action. And the relentless, incessant metallic grind of Wasting Light.They started off so well, way back in 1994, when Dave Grohl left the drum seat of Nirvana and decided to name his band after UFOs and other curious aerial objects. Early songs ( This Is a Call, Monkey Wrench) and early albums (1995's self-titled debut, 1997's The Colour and the Shape) opened up possibilities for a metal band to apply some fairly deft pop signature notes to proceedings. The result was a rock band that stayed true to grunge while trotting out cute melody lines. Wasting Light, produced by Butch Vig, is a far cry from the Foo Fighters' glory days: pretty much every thing seems caught in a default setting marked "bog standard". It's as if Grohl has forgotten his one-time maxim of "the beauty of minimalism and the importance of stripped down music". Awful, just bloody awful.

See foofighters.com