Nobody ever would've thought the
Foo Fighters
were gearing up for a hiatus following the vibrant 2011 LP
Wasting Light
, but the group announced just that in 2012. It was a short-lived break, but during that time-off, lead
Foo
Dave Grohl
filmed an ode to the classic Los Angeles recording studio Sound City, which in turn inspired the group's 2014 album,
Sonic Highways
. Constructed as an aural travelog through the great rock & roll cities of America -- a journey that was documented on an accompanying HBO mini-series of the same name --
picks up the thread left dangling from
Sound City: Real to Reel
; it celebrates not the coiled fury of underground rock exploding into the mainstream, the way the '90s-happy
did, but rather the classic rock that unites the U.S. from coast to coast. No matter the cameo here -- and there are plenty of guests, all consciously different from the next, all bending to the needs of their hosts -- the common denominator is the pumping amps, sky-scraping riffs, and sugary melodies that so identify the sound of arena rock at its pre-MTV peak. There are a few unexpected wrinkles, as when
Ben Gibbard
comes aboard to give "Subterranean" a canned electronic pulse and
Tony Visconti
eases the closing "I Am a River" into a nearly eight-minute epic, but the brief eight-song album just winds up sounding like nothing else but the
at their biggest, burliest, and loudest. They've become the self-proclaimed torch barriers for real rock, championing the music's history but also blessedly connecting the '70s mainstream and '80s underground so it's all one big nation ruled by six-strings. That the mainstream inevitably edges out the underground on
is perhaps inevitable -- it is the common rock language, after all -- but even if there's a lingering predictability in the paths the
follow on
, they nevertheless know how to make this familiar journey pleasurable. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine