It must be hard being Dave Grohl, you have to wrestle with the tag of being the 'nicest guy in rock' (tm) whilst still producing songs that will sate your ravenous rock fanbase. Sometimes, it just doesn't quite work out.
'Times Like These' is probably the safest song on the far-better-than-the-last-album 'One By One', and because of that, it suffers. Nothing wrong with the song per se, in fact its a radio-humping FM-crushing melange of memorable riffs, redeeming rhetoric and crunching overdrive. But doesn't that riff remind you of Simple Minds? And doesn't it sound a bit too much like a re-working of 'Learning To Fly'?
Problem is, you come back with something like 'All My Life', and you raise the bar; offer this, and you're ducking well beneath it.
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6Gareth Dobson's Score