There are bumps in the winding round on which this album takes you for a ride, "Stranger Things" is about as strange as the colour brown, its totally run-of-the mill and wont cause you orifice to jump for joy (drums and fuzz would have helped) and a disappointing finish: "Home," which is just Grohl on vocals, piano and too much melodrama. Grohl, guitarist Chris Shiflett, bassist Nate Mendel and drummer Taylor Hawkins make the same points about loss, defiance and rescue better earlier: in the machine-gun-guitar stutter of "Erase/Replace" (Grohl writes riffs like a drummer) and the shape-shifting "Let It Die," which starts with cautious acoustic questioning ("In too deep and out of time/Why'd you have to go and let it die?"), then blows up into a full-metal cross-examination.
Grohl often shows off his sky-high vocal range, award-winning ear for bridges and choruses and penchant for ending opuses with dark, pitch-perfect shrieks and he doesn’t leave this out on the album. We hear his grunge like screeching on tracks such as the first single, “The Pretender”; just hearing it sends a shudder straight through you, with the reassurance that this band still, after 15years, can make great music.
And there is "Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners," a finger picking ballet with guest guitarist Kaki King. Grohl wrote the instrumental after meeting a survivor of a 2006 mine collapse in Tasmania (while trapped underground, the miner asked for an iPod loaded with Foo songs to keep him company) and swore to record it. The track makes no sense, even in this eclecticism except that Grohl is a man of his word.
With their sixth studio effort, Foo Fighters have delivered the "mature" album, which isn't as dreaded a development as it sounds. Dave Grohl and company have assembled a strong assortment of the band's familiar, well-built tuneage, from muscular rockers and sinuous ballads to good-natured power-pop and riff-heavy radio anthems. Everything comes drenched in hooks, except for Grohl's folksy, finger-picked instrumental duet with Kaki King. It's the only real left-field moment on a disc with appealing range but not much momentum.
Commentary
The audience for my album review is the general public and people who have a specialist interest in rock music. The purpose of the magazine article was to inform, entertain and to persuade people to buy the album. Throughout the article I kept the tone fairly informal and made it as if I was talking to the reader and not just giving them information, this is evident when I write, “Its formulaic, sure, but as an attention-grabbing opening it ranks amongst their best”
The lexis I have used is fairly complicated and more formal in parts of the article such as, “anthology”, “eclecticism” and “formulaic” but I used some simpler, traditional lexis such as “Shows off”, “Dark” and “album”. I felt using a balance of both simple and complicated lexis would keep the reader interested, if I would have used too much of a certain type of lexis it may have marginalised my target audience as well as boring them. To keep in style with my informal tone of this piece, I have used language which the reader can connect to the article with. I have also used language from the semantic field of music with such lexis as “finger-picked instrumental”, “sky-high vocal range” and “instrumental”; this was to establish a sense of realism within the article. Grammatically I have used different varied features. I have used adjectives such as “strong”, “folksy” and “winding” I have also used phrases from the semantic field of rock music as adjectives such as, “Southern-rock Stompers”, “Glam-candy” and “Goth folkies”, this is to make the article more interesting instead of using just one word adjectives which would make the piece exceedingly dull.
In this piece there is a mixture of short and complex sentences, I used a balance again so I don’t marginalise my target audience to people who have superior reading skills. I do use more complex longer sentences such as, “Just hearing it sends a shudder straight through you, with the reassurance that this band still, after 15years, can make great music.” This creates a steady, balanced pace within the article.
I also tried to add a sarcastic humour to the piece, to make it slightly more light hearted and less heavy handed, “Stranger Things is about as strange as the colour brown, its totally run-of-the mill and wont cause you orifice to jump for joy” Sentences such as these effect the ton e of the piece, as it makes the reader feel less like there reading a lecture and more like there reading good advice.