Foo Fighters’ “The Colour and the Shape”: Twentieth anniversary review

While it was the first Foo Fighters album to feature bassist Nate Mendel, also of Sunny Day Real Estate, The Colour and the Shape was still arguably not the project of a full band like later Foo Fighters releases, as the finished product featured only one person’s drum-takes: those of former Nirvana’s stickman Dave Grohl.

He was the Foos’ bandleader and ‘founder’ since releasing a project, with its instruments mainly played by Grohl himself, under the name Foo Fighters in 1995.

The 1997 work opens with ‘Doll’, a gentle pop-rock gem miles away from track two, ‘Monkey Wrench’, which is an angry tour-de-force far better and arguably angrier than anything on the first Foo Fighters collection, and yet still catchier than its precedent on the album. ‘Hey, Johnny Park!’ occupies sonic middle ground between the first two songs here, a classic exercise of going between quiet and loud sounds and blending them into a satisfying whole: a masterclass, then, in post-grunge dynamics.

‘My Poor Brain’ attempts to do something similar, probably, but comes off inferior ‘Up in Arms’ does not mix up its dynamics, instead of producing a quiet version and loud version of the same song and placing them next to each other on the same track. But that comes after the blast of noise that is ‘Wind Up’ and before the anthemic ode to the “ordinary” person, ‘My Hero’, which is followed by the jazzy ‘See You’. At this point, it is clear the album – while clearly in the rock genre — is far from samey.

‘Enough Space’ is, with the exception of its opening verse, a screaming but slickly produced and awesome-sounding noise-fest blurring the boundaries of punk, metal, post-grunge and grunge. Apart from its rocking ending, the next track could not be much different from the ninth song here, while hit single ‘Everlong’, if its album version featured a section with an acoustic guitar, would be the epitome of everything that the album seemingly aims to be.

Multifaceted, emotive, well written lyrically and, in purely musical terms, brilliantly formed, with excellent dynamics, it is, overall, superbly solid pop-rock songcraft. A tough act to follow indeed – but the mellow love song ‘Walking After You’ and would-be stadium-shaker ‘New Way Home’ are far from mediocre, even in comparison to the album’s mighty eleventh track.

There are some shortfalls here, as the quiet-loud formula is arguably rinsed dry, with the occasional less-than-excellent moment, like the arguably needless repetition of the first verse in ‘Up In Arms’ appearing. Also, perhaps the entirety of ‘Wind Up’ and ‘My Poor Brain’ could be omitted without much being missed. But they would probably seem great in a different context, and those criticisms probably seem like petty nit-picking to all but the most thorough, OCD analyst. It is a brilliant album.

RATING: 9.5 out of 10