Does My Heaven Burn Like Hell

Foo Fighters @ Ed Sullivan Theater 4/12/2011

Bridge Burning / Rope / Dear Rosemary / White Limo / Arlandria / These Days / Back and Forth / A Matter of Time / Miss the Misery / I Should Have Known / Walk / All My Life / Times Like These / My Hero / Learn to Fly / Cold Day in the Sun / Big Me / Stacked Actors / Monkey Wrench / Everlong / The Best of You / This Is a Call

Foo Fighters “Back and Forth”

In the time since The Colour and the Shape, the Foo Fighters became a band that could be relied upon to produce a few quality modern rock singles with each new record, but not a lot more. And this was fine: Dave Grohl is his generation’s equivalent to Tom Petty, and being Tom Petty is no bad thing. Wasting Light, the band’s seventh studio album, breaks this cycle. It’s a solid rock album, one of the best straight-ahead mainstream rock records of the past few years. Almost every song on the thing sounds like it should be a big hit. This resurgence will probably be lost on a lot of people though, because mainstream modern rock is pretty much the least cool genre going right now. I totally get why people have blinders to this stuff — a huge amount of it is total garbage, and even a lot of the decent stuff basically sounds like going to the mall. But Grohl is a master of this genre, and his band delivers simple thrills with remarkable clarity, precision and power. As a critic it is kinda hard to put a thoughtful spin on this music — there’s no clever concept, no novelty factor, and Grohl’s lyrics are so vague that pretty much any song could either be about the death of Kurt Cobain or a conflict with anyone ranging from the love of his life to someone who cut him off in traffic. It’s not easy to frame this music, but framing it is beside the point: It’s catchy and it rocks and sometimes that is all you need.

Buy it from Amazon.

Here’s the full concert from last night, by the way: