Caught In The Echo The 12th studio album from Alt Rock legends Foo Fighters, called Your Favorite Toy, is a ten-track effort that was produced by the band and Oliver Roman. This marks the first time Foo Fighters have gone outside of longtime producer/collaborator Greg Kurstin since 2014’s Sonic Highways, and in retrospect that was a bit of a risk on Dave Grohl and his bandmates’ part. Your Favorite Toy sounds like a big rock record, was recorded in Grohl’s home studio in Los Angeles, and yet when you wrap your ears around the LP you can’t help but feel like it’s not up to the same quality of the band’s most recent output. It’s the first Foo Fighters record to have Ilan Rubin (Paramore, NIN, Angels & Airwaves) behind the kit, and he does a commendable (if not the near-impossible) job of filling in for the late Taylor Hawkins. Some of the singles, like “Caught in the Echo” and lead single of “Asking For a Friend”, feel like a blend between what Foo Fighters have done on key albums like Wasting Light and One By One, while the other material that surrounds these key songs could have used a little more fine-tuning.
”Caught In The Echo” kicks off the 12th chapter of Foo Fighters career with a raucous wail of a guitar and near-screamed vocals from Grohl as he shouts, “Do I? Do I? Do I? / This is just a test / Of a broken broadcast system / Consider this an evaluation / Of my hallucinations.” For the same lyricist and vocalist of songs like “Everlong” and “Learn To Fly”, I was expecting a bit more in the lyric department. The music itself on the opener is a raucous good time, and makes for a pretty enjoyable listening experience overall. Other clumsy lyrics fall in line for “Of All People” as Grohl sings, “Of all people, you survived / When no one else could stay alive / You know you should be dead / But you’re alive instead”. That verse reads like someone who has a third grade vocabulary, but I digress. As good as the music is around these lyrics, it’s really hard to ignore when Grohl croons on “The Window”, “I saw your face there in the window / You were a window cleaner letting in the sun / Man, that looks like fun.”
The title track is a bit of a messy slab of lyrics as Grohl throws together the chorus of, “Get back, hear that, boy? / Someone threw away your favorite toy for good / For good / Hey!” It’s like I’m getting Déjà vu of when I first heard Green Day’s abysmal Father Of All Motherfuckers and I’m trying to make sense of how a band that talented could regress so sharply in a short period of time. Things get back on track a little bit on “If You Only Knew”, the song that closes out the perplexing front half of Your Favorite Toy, as Grohl sings on the second verse, “Right down the middle, dog on a chain / The water from the well circling the drain / Hand on the trigger, I’m holding fire / The passing of the flame burning up inside.” The mysterious nature of these lyrics is kind of what I was expecting throughout Foo Fighters’ 12th record, and it makes up for lost time.
The back half begins with “Spit Shine”, a song with a great, spiraling guitar groove throughout from Pat Smear, Chris Shifflet, and Grohl over a near-punk rock attack of speedy lyrics. Grohl offers the advice on the chorus, “And as you get a bit older / Cash in the chips on your shoulder / The honeymoon is over,” to help with balancing out the screamed vocals in the verses with a smoother approach. “Unconditional” begins with a steady beat from Rubin before the clean guitars paint a vivid musical landscape that sounds like vintage Foo Fighters. The uplifting chorus of, “Find a better way / To explain this to you / There are better days / Awaiting, it’s true” finds Grohl grappling with his own mortality before later admitting, “Under one condition though / It’s unconditional.”
”Child Actor” finds Grohl comparing his early career to putting on a show as he ponders, “As I wait for the curtain to fall / Was it good enough? / Was it ever good enough?” It’s nice to get some further insight into his state of mind as he gets comfortable in the latter stages of his career now. The mid-tempo track pleads to “Turn the cameras off” multiple times, over a bass-heavy riff from Nate Mendel. It’s songs like these that remind me of the magic that can happen when the band is locked into their Alt Rock legend status and believing in their material. “Amen, Caveman” finds Grohl imagining the end of days as he sings, “We go down to zero and back again / Down to zero / Amen, caveman”. The track does have a bit of a swagger to it, and is a pretty fun listen. The lead single of “Asking For a Friend” closes out this divisive twelfth chapter from Foo Fighters with at least the needle pointing the right way at the end. The bridge of, “Give me a reason, show me a sign / Ugliest truth or your prettiest lie / Free you from burden, take what I give / Take it away now, permission to live” is a strong final statement to leave the audience with, and showcases the strengths of the band.
Overall, Your Favorite Toy ends up being a bit of a mixed bag. The music is solid, especially on the back half, but the strange and simplistic lyrics ended up detracting from fully enjoying the album as a whole. Eventually this record becomes background noise that you can throw on if you’re not too focused on the full front-to-back album experience. Foo Fighters are too talented to get this complacent in their songwriting approach, and you can’t help but think this is one Toy you’ll forget you own after a few weeks time.