Mine is yours and yours is mine, there is no divide

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

24/07/05 : In Your Honor - Foo Fighters

This is our fifth visit with them Foos - I don't mind them, but none of the previous visits have really hit the spot.  Let's see what we've got here, shall we?

What we have is a definite game of two halves with the first being a load of rockier numbers and the second being slower acoustic almost ballads - and I'm not sure which one I preferred.  In general, I think I preferred the rockier numbers, but they got too much after the first five or so - which wasn't the case for the slower numbers, but none of them really stood out from the crowd and it was definitely a drag towards the end (and I struggle to imagine too many Foos fans were happy with them).  The more Foo Fighter stuff I hear, the more I feel they're a "best of" band - it looks like there will be a week in 2009 when I get the chance to break the rules and find out, but in the meantime I can assure you I won't be revisiting this.

We're at #11 in the charts this week on their sixth week of an extremely generous 37 week run with it having peaked at #2 in its debut week.  The top five this week were James Blunt, a Michael Jackson best-of (a new entry which did remarkably poorly on release, but was #1 for seven weeks in '09 after his death and is currently on a 48 week run in the charts), Coldplay, Faithless and Kaiser Chiefs and the next highest new entries were Kelly Clarkson (#10) and Stephen Fretwell (#34) which was an album I liked when I was introduced to it by #AOTB but had completely forgotten about since.

Wikipedia has loads on the album (251 milliPeppers) but there's an awful lot of nothing in there.  It does tells us it was indeed a double album with each having a different theme and the price was set at $1 more than a single album because, as Dave put it, "I don't need any more money" (although I'm not entirely sure things work that way).  Guest stars on the album include Norah Jones (who doesn't feel an obvious Foos fan), John Paul Jones and Josh Homme (who do).  The critics were imho surprisingly nice about it, although I do agree with Billboard who said "by scaling back their ambitions, the Foos could have made one great album instead of two average ones".  Commercially it did OK, getting to #2 in US as well as here (kept off the top by Coldplay in both countries) but it did get to the top in Australia, Finland, New Zealand and Sweden.

"Customers also listened to" Red Hot Chili Peppers, Them Crooked Vultures, Queens Of The Stone Age and Kings Of Leon - yeah, a definitely similar vibe there.  I still like Foo Fighters because there's nothing here to make me hate them, but there's also nothing here to make me love them and it feels someone should have questioned whether they really needed to do this.

17/07/05 - Certainly could have been worse
31/07/05 - A fine album indeed

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