Foo Fighters: One by One

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * * )

They start selling off the Nirvana family silver on Monday, which, despite what his accountant might say, is unfortunate timing for Dave Grohl and his band Foo Fighters, here on their fourth album.

Heck, but Grohl's always been one to live with comparisons. This one comes with another hard act to follow - Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf, on which he returned to the drums after putting his own band's recording on hold, rejecting the early results.

However, the reboot seems to have worked wonders. Right from opener, the stuttering-riffed, hard-hollering great single All My Life (which swaggers along a little like QOTSA's Feelgood Hit of the Summer), there's an urgency to the 11 tracks which makes One By One one exciting rock'n'roll record with exceptional songs.

Among those is one un-rock number entitled Tired of You, a slowly snowballing ballad which might feature Queen's Brian May on arty guitar but is a song elegantly sad enough to have been on Beck's recent Seachange.

That song also indicates an increased emotional pull to the songwriting which, fortunately, displaces Grohl's past tendencies towards lyrical goofiness. Which brings with it yet another comparison - maybe it's the "aha" factor when Grohl sings "I'm a new day rising" on the hopeful Times Like These but there sounds to be echoes of Husker Du in some corners of this. It fits. After all, like Grohl's former band, the 80s American alt-rock band were a troubled trio with a drummer who wasn't content to just drum.

Anyway, if some of the later stages of One by One (Overdrive and Burn Away) sound like the songs you would put down the end of an album after a solid start, then it's redeemed by the eight-minute grand finale Come Back, mainly because it has an even better Nirvana chorus than that band's new posthumous hit You Know You're Right. Hey, Grohl helped to invent this stuff. And here, in his and his cohorts' hands, it sounds terrific.

label: RCA