Posted: 6/23/2005, 3:43 pm
thanks sonya, i found that too, and around 5 am i finally received a foo fighters.com email with the other presale info 
Dread wrote:I figured I'd just use this thread to talk about the actual album. Here's what I said about the album on another board. P.S. I've been a big fan of the band since I was 15, so forgive the longwinded post...It's the moment everyone's been waiting for. That's right, it is time for Dread's first impressions after one listen through Foo Fighters' newest album, "In Your Honor." Yay! Woohoo!
First I'll begin by saying that I forced myself to like their last album much more than I did at first, and now I plainly state that "One by One" is without a doubt their weakest album. So, I don't want to go too overboard here just yet.
First, let's start with the rock disc. It could very well be not even as good as "One by One." Sure, "Free Me," "DOA," "End Over End," and "In Your Honor" (I changed my mind about this song) kick ass, but... there's just something missing from it. Perhaps it's a lack of diversity. Perhaps they were trying too hard to rock out. But there might be more hope for it then "One by One" due to the fact that I don't like it a whole lot right away. Time will tell.
So that leaves the acoustic disc, and so begins the gushing. When I first heard about them doing this, I was highly optimistic. Finally, in the eight years that I've liked the band, they would be doing something different for a change. "One by One" suffered because it was mostly more of the same. Surely they couldn't do that with acoustic stuff, right? You can't strain yourself to rock hard on acoustic, since acoustic music doesn't rock generally. And I'm happy to say this album absolutely meets up to my expectations, and even shatters them from time to time. It is masterful. It is familiar, but different. It is like Beck's "Sea Change" album, which was all acoustic and sappy, too, and I also love a lot. And the strings, mandolin, accordion, piano, keyboards, and harmonica found on various songs add such a fantastic and layered dimension to the affair. The Norah Jones song? Exactly as great as I was hoping it would be. I have loved Dave's vocals since I first heard "Everlong" in 1997, and I'm totally not ashamed to admit that. This disc highlights just how awesome and underrated his voice can be. On one song, his voice reaches a high note that I never thought it could reach. So what makes me think that I'm not forcing myself to like this more than I actually do? My tastes in music have matured greatly since 2002, and I know I know better now. This disc is the kind of stuff I actually listen to more now, while the rock disc is kind of stuck in the past.
I wish I could just recommend the acoustic disc to people, so they could go out and buy it separately. So if you are at all remotely interested in this album, snatch up the album before the first week sales are over and the price gets hiked up for being a double album. It's only $9.99 at some places. And just listen to the acoustic disc, and save the rock disc for when you want to see just how inferior it is to the acoustic. Or just download the acoustic disc from somewhere.
Some time later...listened to them both twice now (83 total minutes, two times over), and the rock disc does sound better now. Still, I'm haunted by "One by One" and inevitable decline of favor I had for it, so we'll see how this holds up in a few months. It's still not as good as the first three albums, but it might be better than the previous one.
Oh, and "Over and Out" on the acoustic disc is this millennium's (since we've reached so far in it already ) "Everlong." It's like a mix of Led Zeppelin and Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" (or at least Cash's version of the song), which is sort of ironic since it isn't one of the songs that famed Zeppelin member John Paul Jones plays on.
And "Friend of a Friend" is about Kurt Cobain, being the actual first song clearly about him. Critics like to think there are more than that though. But since the song was actually written in 1992, it's really a no-brainer. Even the word 'nevermind' is part of the lyrics in an amusing way.
So, in short... if you don't like the acoustic album, you shouldn't really like the Foo Fighters anyway. Go home.
The truth is, I wholy disagree with all of that, I absolutely love the non-acoustic album, the first 3 tracks are a flawless opener to a great album and the acoustic album isn't too bad, I like it, but it's so slow, I expected most of them to be slow, but every song is slower than the last album's "Times Like These" acoustic version