I expect to see the Foo Fighters featured in "Have You Seen Me?" ads on the backs of milk cartons any day now-- a band this lost needs all the help they can get. What happened to the uneasy, no-frills drive they once had? I think back to "Everlong" and hear Dave Grohl's uncertain musings of whether "anything could be this good again," and in the clarity of hindsight, it seems the answer, unfortunately, is a deafening "no," screamed over the shiniest, shallowest guitar bridges around. With every album, the Foos get slicker than before; the passion behind their songs waxed off by an ever-thickening veneer of overproduction. Right now, the Foos are so polished you can see right through them.
One by One is a particularly apt title for their fourth radio-ready shout-along: slowly, inevitably, the last rough edge of the Foo Fighters' sound has been buffed away, leaving most of these songs with a palpable emptiness. Which is not to say the Foo Fighters were ever lo-fi, just that, next to this one, The Colour and the Shape could have been recorded out of a suitcase. At the very least, though, there's a sense of substance. The weightless, antiseptic cuts of One by One seem to reach for the racing glory of "Everlong", but fall short; they don't get their hands dirty long enough to even recall the beautiful filth of "Stacked Actor". Without exception, studio gloss aims to pass for the excellence the Foos have occasionally displayed on their previous two albums; it never even comes close to the relative grit and power of their debut.
Now, I'd be deceiving you if I didn't say that there was a saving grace to One by One. It's a scary, awful sort of saving grace, but you take what you can get. Despite the tepid, manufactured essence of these songs, and their failure to create any sort of sustained, visceral jolt, Grohl & Co have managed to hit on a sort of mediocre consistency by virtue of the precision with which their material is recorded. Really, the fact that any of these songs sound at all distinct from one another is kind of an achievement in light of 1999's There Is Nothing Left to Lose.
The glossy, assembly line techniques hold the record together, but their clinical craftsmanship creates eleven songs about as superficially interesting and diverse as they are uninspired. Grohl even seems to admit as much in the album's booklet. Throughout are crude drawings of disembodied, bleeding hearts (illustrated by renowned artist Raymond Pettibone) with accompanying text clearly retaliating against the record industry's dehumanizing of commercial music-- the old face-off of art vs commerce. On the center page, the words are handwritten: "I do wrong to put my heart into what I write. That is no longer done." If this is simply drama to accompany the theme of the artwork, as some might suggest, it's an awfully suspect choice of words for a record so packed with commercial potential and no actual heart. And if the sentiment is sincere, Grohl must understand that it's the choice he's made-- label execs might be aggressive or persistent, but no one's forced him into commercial viability.
One by One does, in fact, deliver what the business expects-- it's a groove the Foo Fighters have hit on before, and it's the prevailing mindset behind virtually every single that hits the airwaves: mindless catchiness. We've heard it in songs like "Breakout", but the Foos had never put together a full album's worth of this stuff until now. And yet, even this presumedly intentional dumbing-down can't cloak Grohl's skill as a songwriter. The lyrics may be utterly banal, but the hooks are tight. And in that sense, the record isn't a total loss; if you're looking for flashy radio rock, look no further. "Burn Away" is like "Learn to Fly" lite: it soars on similar wings for about five minutes, and it's even pretty great while it lasts, but after it finds its way back to Earth, you may be hard-pressed to recall the impact. The same holds true for "Low", whose blistering aggression and searing guitar attack serves nicely as One by One's token kick to the groin (even if it feels more like a charley horse), despite being totally out of step with an album that largely opts for sweep over brutality. Still, if nothing else, it shows that Dave's been paying very close attention during his time with the Queens of the Stone Age.
What's surprising is that, in the end, One by One's even, middling quality proves to be its silver lining. In the car, on that long descent into rush hour, it could come and go without so much as a batted eye, but neither would you be scrambling to change the disc. Its skillful composition is undeniable-- the problem is that it comes without any real strength or character. Foo Fighters have been in short supply of both for a while now, and this record might be a hint that they now plan to do without them entirely; I just can't help but miss the sincerity of their older material. At one time, Foo Fighters could pull off "great" with a fraction of the technical support; One by One had its sights set on "good enough" from the very beginning.
