Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace

With 2005’s <i>In Your Honor</i>, the Foo Fighters distinctly divided their approach into acoustic and electric collections that helped the band fully explore their disparate influences without watering down either approach. For the follow-up, 2007’s <i>Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace</i>, the group string their various approaches together for what flows as a naturally stylistically diverse album, comfortable expressing its angst with distorted guitars and emotionally charged pleading (“But, Honestly”) or with the piano and gentle orchestration of the album’s closing ballad (“Home”). Singer Dave Grohl has always seemed most comfortable leading a hard rock charge, and “The Pretender”, “Cheer Up, Boys” and “Long Road to Ruin” are readymades for the Foo Fighters’ live assault. However, the album’s most surprising and affecting moments are the subdued shades of the whispered forecasts of “Stranger Things Have Happened” and the duet with acoustic guitar virtuoso Kaki King for “Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners”, where Grohl displays an emotive range that establishes him as a first-rate singer, in case there was any doubt.