Album: Foo Fighters

Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace (Roswell/Sony)

The curiously titled Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace – four qualities notable by their scarcity in its dozen tracks – attempts to cover in one album the breadth of styles dispersed across two discs on 2005's In Your Honour. Thus is the Foos' signature powerhouse rock style leavened here with occasional touches of piano, strings or accordion, and plenty of acoustic guitar passages, including a fingerpicking duet with Kaki King, "Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners", inspired by the trapped New Zealand miners who asked rescuers for an iPod of Foo Fighters' songs to dispel the boredom while waiting to be dug free. The results sound in places like the heavier mode of CSNY ("Summer's End"), or REM in their Monster period ("Cheer Up, Boys"), though Dave Grohl's proclamations of individuality, digs at deceit and fretful rakings-over of fractured relationships mostly conform to the quiet/loud dynamic he helped devise in Nirvana, best exemplified here in the wracked, raucous "Let It Die".

Download this: 'Let It Die', 'Summer's End', 'The Pretender'