Echoes, Silence, Patience, & Grace took the split experiment of In Your Honor’s half-electric, half-acoustic double album approach and crammed it together, not just alternating between mellow stripped back songs and rockers, but often doing both in the same song. Coupled with the experience of touring with added instruments for Skin And Bones, the band seemed more at ease with experimenting with texture, dynamics, and structure. At that point in their career, that’s admirable, and it’s particularly respectable that they’d try to marry the sides they had previously kept awkwardly separate on In Your Honor. The drawback is that in allowing a more expansive vision of what Foo Fighters music could try to do, the band wound up producing a somewhat schizophrenic and uneven album.

When it worked, it worked well. A song like “The Pretender,” still one of the stronger latter day Foo Fighters offerings, manages to meld the melody-driven side of the band as well as their desire to have the big explosive rock moments The hybrid nature is probably most evident on “Let It Die,” where serene acoustic guitars give way to chugging power chords and Grohl wailing within the span of four minutes. While in this case “dynamic variety” inevitably equated starting quiet, going big, then BIG, “Come Alive” and “But, Honestly” also use this format and remain some of the more enjoyable tracks here. The latter seems to have occasionally elicited disdain amongst the fanbase, but melodically feels like a call back to their late ’90s work in a way that’s refreshing rather than a rehash.

Elsewhere, the variety doesn’t always work, whether it’s a more classic-sounding Foos song falling flat or a bit of experimentation that just isn’t a good look for the band. As Foo Fighters have gotten bigger and hung out with a lot of classic rock artists, it seems they’ve grown more comfortable more directly signaling the influence of their ’70s childhoods, not just their ’80s punk or ’90s alternative sides. In addition, Echoes, Silence, Patience, & Grace is Grohl’s first as a father, and he seems both more interested in timelessness and big ideas. A lot of people cited “Summer’s End,” which sounds vaguely like a really poppy Neil Young song, as one of the weaker links on the album, though I’d argue it’s actually one of the ones that clicks. Its chorus is very small-screen for Foo Fighters, but an earworm in its own way. The piano ballad drag of “Statues” and “Home” (which Grohl, somewhat inexplicably, cited as the best song he’s ever written upon the album’s release) are where the album’s experimentation stumbles.

As for the more traditional-sounding Foo Fighters songs — a lot of those fared better than I’d remembered, with “Cheer Up, Boys! (Your Make-Up is Running),” “Erase/Replace,” and “Long Road to Ruin” seeming stronger than they did back in 2007. Even so, after a few listens, and when placed against similar-sounding material from earlier albums, they feel a bit inert, with the possible exception of “Cheer Up, Boys!.” Foo Fighters’ drive towards experimentation is respectable, and results in some moment worth revisiting, but Echoes, Silence, Patience, & Grace has come to feel like a transitional work, a point where the band was trying out a lot of different ideas before eventually going back-to-basics with Wasting Light in 2011.