Your Favorite Toy Review

After the grief of But Here We Are, Foo Fighters went back to the garage, more or less literally: Dave Grohl's house, a new drummer in Ilan Rubin and ten songs that rarely drop below full speed. At thirty six minutes it is lean by their standards, and the best of it, Caught in the Echo, the title track and Of All People, has a scrappy, distorted urgency the band sanded off years ago. Rubin plays like a man with something to prove, and the mix keeps the guitars rough rather than radio smooth, closer to a club show than an arena.

The trouble is the relentlessness. With nearly every song at the same tempo and volume, the record flattens out in its second half, and the quieter moments that gave their best albums shape are missing. Grohl's lyrics remain the weak link: vague encouragement, stock defiance and, on Amen, Caveman, lines that read like placeholders. As a jolt of life from a band that could easily coast, it works. As a set of songs to live with, it is thinner than it first sounds.