Foo Fighters bring cheer with new album ‘Medicine at Midnight’

The dead of winter continues with no serious return to the land of live music in sight. But here’s some great news. Three fine new albums by three practiced but stylistically different pop acts have surfaced over the past three weeks, with the most visible, Foo Fighters’ “Medicine at Midnight,” hitting stores this weekend.

So let winter drag on. Here are some welcome new sounds to warm up to.

Foo Fighters, Medicine at Midnight

For the better part of his tenure as captain of Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl has been engaged in a juggling act between the hot-wired, post grunge drive he inherited from Nirvana and a giddier garage rock attitude than has created a fascinating ebb and flow within his own music. On “Medicine at Midnight,” the 10th Foo Fighters album, Grohl goes with the flow. It’s the sleekish, cheeriest and most pop conscious work yet from the band, who was last in Lexington in 2018 for an exuberant Rupp performance that included bikes and burgers through downtown.

By this point, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Three singles have already been issued from the album, which was reportedly completed nearly a year ago. Nonetheless, the current state of the Foos is tossed at us headfirst during the album-opening “Making A Fire.” A Taylor Hawkins drum roll serves as ignition, a guitar hook triggering the band’s dizzy and dense ensemble sound sets the cranky mood in motion and a cheery pack of na-na-na vocals more indicative of a Friday night football fest than a Foo Fighters record signals liftoff.

The fun morphs and warps with considerable abandon after that with producer Greg Kurstin back on board (he also oversaw the Foos’ 2017 album “Concrete and Gold” as well as records by Adele, Paul McCartney, Sia, Beck, Halsey and a few dozen other all-stars). On “Cloudspotter,” a crisper, cleaner guitar riff gets peppered by percussion clatter creating, of all things, a dance tune. Then all the gauzy cool is lifted and Grohl flicks the switch to the Foos you know – a band bashing out garage-worthy racket that still adheres to a pop mindset. It’s a fascinating mix of tension and cool.

Widening the stylistic scope even further is “Chasing Birds,” a neo-ballad with a woozy sense of pop majesty that brings the Kinks and “Walls and Bridges”-era John Lennon to mind.

Then there are the singles that began giving us a sense of what Grohl and Kurstin had in mind for “Midnight to Medicine” last fall. “Shame Shame” (the tune the Foos debuted on “Saturday Night Live” in November) is a stew of percolating funk while “No Son of Mine” relishes in somewhat perfunctory pop-metal bravado. “Waiting on a War” offers the flip side of the latter with a world-weary view full of deflated expectations leveled by hints of Beatles-esque psychedelia that eventually yield to more expected strains of Foos-level crunch.

More than a few of the band’s loyalists will bristle at all the overt pop touches. But “Medicine at Midnight” is a fine listen, one that finds Grohl and company refusing to tread water while remaining faithful to their loud, giddy roots.

Steven Wilson, The Future Bites

There is a dash of unintended irony surrounding the title of British prog stylist Steven Wilson’s sixth solo album. It was ready for release last summer until the grim realities of the COVID-19 world made any large-scale promotion of the record impossible. Its title (set before the pandemic hit): “The Future Bites.” Maybe it did in terms of letting the Porcupine Tree frontman loose with new music, but the wait has now been made worthwhile.

“The Future Bites” falls just shy of electronica with a gorgeous wintry sheen that seeps into in every manner of the song arrangements, from making backing vocals sound like violas to giving many of the tunes an icy, orchestral incandescence.

Lyrically, the album is a lot chillier with dystopian undercurrents running everywhere. The hit of the pack is “Personal Shopper.” It boasts a chorus that makes Alexa sound like Lady Macbeth (“Buy for comfort, buy for kicks, buy and buy until it makes you sick”). That churns over a ferocious dance groove and a shopping list of luxury items (diamond cuff links, smart watches, etc.) recited by, of all people, Elton John.

If all that sounds too heavy, the lighter pop confessional “12 Things I Forgot” will cut through the chill to give balance Wilson’s uneasy, but fascinating new world.

Jeff Tweedy, Love is the King

Working as a polar opposite to Wilson’s arctic prog symphony is Wilco chieftain Jeff Tweedy’s third solo album, “Love is the King.” The record is a total product of the pandemic, a project undertaken with sons Spencer (on drums) and Sammy (singing harmony) as his only bandmates when the world locked down.

One might expect the record to possess a purposely unfinished, demo-style coarseness. Actually, “Love is the King” reveals a completeness that nicely compliments its familial intimacy. “Opaline,” “A Robin or a Wren” and especially “Guess Again” offer modest country accents that suggest Tweedy’s pre-Wilco days with Uncle Tupelo, while the ragged electric guitar lines that ride shotgun on “Gwendolyn” enter into the bittersweet pop domain that distinguished early Wilco records like “Being There.”

Lyrically, though, “Love is the King” seems to be very much a product of our times. There are alternating shades of hope and despondency within the album’s 11 songs. Some, like “Bad Day Lately,” wear their restlessness openly. Others, like “Save It For Me,” modestly celebrate resilience in a civilization turned on its ear (“A light left on in an empty room is how a love can be.”)

Good days and bad days. Haven’t we all had them over the past 11 months? Jeff Tweedy obviously has. How nice that he has seen fit to share jagged snapshots from a few of his with us.

This story was originally published February 1, 2021 at 10:53 AM.