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Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace isn’t the most remarkable album Dave Grohl’s ever been a part of, but by any measure that’s a damn high standard to meet. Having contributed to Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age and Nine Inch Nails, to name just a few, Grohl’s rock resume is a wet dream come true for anyone in the music industry. What Echoes happens to be is the best, most confident and diverse Foo Fighters record to date.

What makes their sixth studio album so good isn’t the fact that Grohl has found a way to take the signature Foo sound to a higher level. He has, but with the help of producer Gil Norton, (knob-turner for 1997’s double-platinum The Colour and the Shape) Grohl has also discovered how to break outside his own mold. Echoes is full of pleasant departures and surprises, relying less on the power-pop rockers than gorgeous arrangements and melody. Irresistable hooks expectedly abound, but this time they’re an accessory rather than the vehicle carrying the album.

The album’s lead single, “The Pretender”, has somehow managed to keep from becoming mind-crushingly annoying, even after six thousand radio rotations. There are other obvious singles on deck featuring the staple Foo Fighters sound, such as “Cheer up Boys (Your Makeup is Running)”, “Long Road to Ruin” and my favorite, “Let it Die”. But even with such familiar Foo fare, there is a new dynamic to these songs that provides more listenability than any of their previous albums: melodic texture. It isn’t a reinvention of Grohl’s songwriting style so much as an evolution; these songs have merely been given room to breathe and build in ways that were rare in his previous compositions.

This is most evident on “Erase/Replace”, where three-part harmonies and a string section are featured in the bridge, giving the song a more transcendent air than we’re accustomed to.

Another example is the gripping, disarmingly intimate “Stranger Things Have Happened”, recorded by Grohl alone in a hallway with only an acoustic and a metronome, which can be heard clicking in the background.

With the exception of “Stranger Things Have Happened”, the first seven songs are, by and large, instant arena rockers. The second half of the album takes a softer turn, however, featuring a new melodic depth from Grohl and company that is free of pretense and full of promise.

The farthest departure from the tried-and-true Foo fare on Echoes is “The Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners”, a vocals-free acoustic track featuring slap guitar virtuoso Kaki King, sounding like a mix between Al Di Meola and a coked-out Jack White on a bluegrass kick.

Track ten, the reflective “Statues”, is reminiscent of mid-seventies rock in a Billy Joel-meets-seventies-era-Zeppelin kind of way, while “Home”, a piano-driven ballad completely free of guitars, brings a sense of fragile, heartstring-tugging loneliness.

The final track on the extended edition of Echoes, the true Foo rocker “Once and For All”, gives the listener an optimistic, rising-sound send-off. “My time has come, this means war,” Grohl wails. With an album this good, it’s hard not to be on his side.