Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
Artist: Foo Fighters 
Label: RCA 
Length: 12 tracks / 51:22 min 

In the wake of the outstanding In Your Honor and with Gil Norton, the producer of Foo Fighters’ best album, _The Colour and the Shape_, coming back to work, expectations were high for the band’s new release, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace.

The album’s first single and first track, the high-octane “The Pretender,” lived up to all the hype and more. The following Mustard-Seeds-like “Let It Die” and wall-of-sound “Eraser/Replace” aren’t bad, but then the album takes a nose dive and never recovers. As well as frontman Dave Grohl’s singing (as opposed to yelling) worked on disc two of _In Your Honor_ and his acoustic craftsmanship worked on _Skin and Bones_, he has opted to explore that softer, artsy side preferred by the Grammy voter types, but at the expense of the hard-rockers that made the Foos what they are. Even the heavier songs on this album, apart from the first three, have a formulaic pop flavor, like something you might hear on a bad Tom Petty album. 

They’ve got a couple of songs ( “Come Alive” and “But Honestly”) that are slow for the most part but build up heavily at the end, but those only work in the context of a heavy album. Most of the songs on Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace start off as yawners, and sadly that gives the album the same feel. 

Dan Singleton 
October 16, 2007