Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris

Era Vulgaris (2007) ****

Predictably consistent yet taking a markedly different approach on each release, once again QOTSA solidify their rep as one of the best (the best?) hard rock bands of the Dubya administration.  If the gimmick on Lullabies was bloozy and gothic, the shift on Vulgaris is to the tighter and poppier:  at little over 47 minutes (hey, that's practically an EP in modern terms) and a mere eleven songs, this is the first QOTSA release that does not overstay its welcome.  It helps immensely that it's also the most sonically varied, with a wider swing of tempos and textures than previous entries in Josh Homme's rockalogue.  That said, it's not quite their most accessible, as there aren't any truly knockout singles like "Little Sister" or "Feel Good Hit of the Summer"; it's more of an even ride, without so many of the low valleys that marred the band's more over-long releases.  The poppiness can actually be initially off-putting:  megabyte to digital, what the heck is this opening track, "Turning on the Screw," freakin' Weezer?!  And then there's "Make It Wit Chu," the lead single, which is a poppy, mid-tempo piano-bouncy smooch note - what is this, a metallized Ben Folds Five?!  Relax -- QOTSA offer much more sophisticated hard rock arrangements than the former, even if Homme truly lacks the talent for pop melodicism of either.  The Foo Fighters-ish "3 & 7" (opening riff seems to borrow a bit familiarly from Nirvana, don't it?) is more in line with Homme's alley, and is a much pleasanter new pop direction for the band to navigate.  "Suture Up Your Future," demonstrates that after all these years he's finally gotten to grips with a slow psychedelic one, and then he turns around and closes the album with one of their most relentlessly pounding and heaviest tracks ever, the pummelling "Run Pig Run".  "Into the Hollow," Grimm-ly sounds like an outtake from the previous album, and if "Sick Sick Sick," does indeed feature the Strokes' Julian Casablancas on vocal duties, who cares when the T. Rex-gone-psychorobot riff is so sick sick sick?  Move along, nothing more to analyze here, just one more excellent QOTSA album with their impeccable formula of killer riffs and duckwater-tight, almost proggy arrangements.

Queens of the Stone Age - Lullabies to Paralyze

Lullabies to Paralyze (2005) ***1/2

Nick Oliveri is gone due to drug problems/general fucked-upness, and he's missed, not just his barracuda bass throbbing but his manic intensity, goofball humor, and general wild-ass rock'n'roll presence.  Also seriously missed is Dave Grohl, with the drums noticeably thinner and less beefy without the FF mainman on skins.  That said, QOTSA have always been Josh Homme's baby, and the transition of QOTSA into the Josh Homme Experience isn't that jarring:  despite what some disgruntled fans have to gripe, this is not a major step down for the band.  Oh, it's noticably weaker than the previous couple of albums, with a few too many draggy slow crunchers that hang around far too long on the second half, but the first half is more or less killer (the less consisting of the opening "This Lullaby," sung gruffly by Mark Lanegan).  Should I mention that just as on Songs for the Deaf, there is a concept:  Grimm's fairy tales, which you can feel free to ignore, because the concept basically consists of Homme singing half the songs about witches and wolves, with the rest being concerning the perennial hard-rock subject matter of good'ol sex.  The tone is somewhat raunchier, and not just the lyrical subject matter - the guitar tone and overall feel is considerably bluesier (and bloozier), more warmly (and pleasingly) '70s than Deaf's firmly '00s masters-of-technology bludgeoning sheen.  "Burn the Witch," is practically a John Lee Hooker stomp on steroids, and for the first time Homme unleashes a slow number that's not only bearable but one of the album's highlights, the blues-glammy "I Never Came."  The bonafide hit single, "Little Sister," seems born to blast out of muscle-car speakers down the strip cruising the Wal-Mart parking lot for high school chicks, while "In My Head," begs to be the followup A-side as the album's most relentlessly propulsive and simultaneously poppiest number.  But as I said, the band starts to lose its grip on good material around the midway, with a couple too many 7-minute numbers, which while displaying a welcome addiction to psychedelia ("Someone's in the Wolf," "Blood is Love,") unwelcomely display a bog-standard addiction to banal hard rock lyricism ("Skin on Skin") - namely, a previously undisclosed misogynistic streak.  Disappointing in a band that, while never blew me away with their goofball lyrics, at least kept the subject matter non-stereotypically hard rock-ish, and didn't resort to building a chorus around, "I wanna lick it, lick it, lick it too much!"

   

Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf

Songs for the Deaf (2002) ****

Messago to Josh Homme:  ou-yay are-ay ot-nay unny-fay.  The fake radio station concept isn't nearly as clever as it was the first time around in 1968 (who would've thought up such a concept?  Who, I ask you?  Who?)  Frankly, Homme's sense of humor makes him sound like a douche - you know, the type of smirking douche who would actually use the word 'douche'.  Homophobia is for faggots.  Anyway, the radio broadcasts are easily ignored, but not so Homme's lyrics:  the harder he tries to be clever, the dumber he sounds.    Which I'm not sure is preferable to Nick Oliveri's upfront drug-crazed stoopidity schtick, which apparently is no schtick at all - he genuinely is the drug-crazed lunatic he claims to be on "Six Shooters" (the lone track that flat-out s-u-x, and h-a-r-d) and the opener, "You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, but I Feel Like a Millionaire," (which does not suck - no, it's pretty exciting).

But who listens to QOTSA for lyrics, man?  The only thing we seasoned listeners and zot-faced tweenagers ask from our hard rock is that it rocks.  And once again, the Queens deliver the goods.  You want heavy?  These boys can give you heavy, and heavier than ever before, because on this album the missing link has invited himself to the drum stool:  Dave Grohl (famous for....aw hell, you know).  His monster truck rally drums pound (and do they pound!) the final nail into the mixed metaphor that is QOTSA's modernized Cream.  QOTSA have arguably released their best album ever, and yet.....while the band is tighter, more powerful, heavier, harder, punchier, yadda zinga zooba, it's still a draw with the previous album, as this album has one notable and glaring flaw:

It goes on forever and it all sounds the same.

OK, technically that's two flaws.  And every album these days lasts over an hour (fuck you, CD running length), so maybe kids raised on a steady diet of nothing but hour-length CDs have generationally had their ears rewired to accept such lengths without boredom and monotony.  I, however, have my ears wired so that 22:22 minutes is the scientifically optimal length for side one, before you  switch over to side two.  So maybe that's not a legitimate complaint for Gen Y.  But the monotony of sound?  That is a legitimate gripe.  And see how these two flaws compound each other when combined?  It's like swallowing sleeping pills on top of alcohol.  Anyhow, it's not as if there isn't some variety; but while, "Mosquito Song," is a noticable improvement over their previous ballads (OK, a vast improvement), it comes foolishly as the final song - which does not make the preceding 13 tracks in a row any less monotonous.  Maybe it's the unvarying guitar tone - the exact same problem I have with the New Pornographers (the problem, not the guitar tone).  It's a problem that in particular seems to afflict a few too many bands of our age.  QOTSA try to cover this up with the production trick of dramatic volume shifts (soft, LOUD) but that's annoying more than anything, and besides, PJ Harvey did that to better effect a decade previous.

Now, upon reading this review, one might get the impression that I dislike this album.  Zounds!  (That means, "God's wounds!" in Elizabethan English.  See, that Master's degree study has been useful for something beyond, " 'Twouldest thou likest fries with that, m'lady?")    "No One Knows," pounds away with heavy pop hit single sheen; "First It Giveth," driveth alongeth with a most drivingesteth basso profundo line; "The Sky is Falling," mixes goth-psychedelia with Sabbath crunch most heavenly. "Go With the Flow," "Gonna Leave You," and "Another Love Song," (nice '60s-ish roller rink organ [barely noticable at first] in the background) are just excellent pop-garage-metal numbers, and....well, there are good things to say about most of the tracks, aren't there?  Definitely more hits than misses (90% last time I crunched the numbers at my day job as an accountant for the Jamaican drug trade).  This is more or less as good as hard rock gets in the '00s.  Never mind my bitchin' & quibblin'.

Oh, you say the '00s are over?  Done?  Two years it has been?  My, how time flyeth.

Queens of the Stone Age - Rated R

Rated R (2000) ****

Adding a heavy dose of psychedelia and more than a smidgen of pop to the Queens' heavy rock formula makes for an expected rise in quality.  First off, this has one element that the debut sorely lacked:  a sense of variety.  Not that the Queens vary too far into the eclectic soundscape - it's still all mid-tempo rockers, heavy and glammy at the same time, with a handful of thrashy goofs for good measure ("Quick and to the Pointless," and the infamous opening track, the pro-drugs "Feel Good Hit of the Summer," both screamed goofily by bassist Nick Oliveri).  The latter manages to be awesomely catchy ("c-c-c-COCAINE!") and rather annoying at the same time, while the "Pointless" lives up to its title.  The production makes the guitar fuzz rather mellower yet still bite-y in a metallized Revolver kinda way; I'm sure heavy ingestations of marijuana were responsible for the oddly cuddly vibe to this heavy rock.  No, I can't avoid drug references when discussing this album - why would I even try?  The band make those stellarly clear themselves, and thus helped usher in the era of "Stoner Rock" as the critics coined and many bands of the genre embraced the label:  rejecting the excesses of '80s glam-metal and '90s grunge, and skipping back to the '70s hard rock ethos but with a more modernized sound.  You know, taking metal back to its roots, when it was tied to gritty rock'n'roll, not the slickly produced technological horror-show for 13 year olds it morphed into in the '80s.  Better songs about such down to earth rock'n'roll topics as drugs and scamming for underage groupies than Corpsevomit and carnivorous erections.  OK, so my biases are clear - I detest the vast majority of post-'70s metal, mostly for the polished production values and wheedly-whee guitar tones that divorce it from what I understand to be rock'n'roll.  Yeah, rock, but it don't roll.  QOTSA actually roll from time to time, perhaps because unlike most metal bands, they don't seem to erase the bass player's parts from the mix - sure, they're as guilty of dynamic overcompression as any modern band, but they have an actual rhythmic groove underneath the guitar parts.

Anyway, back to the album in question, after getting sidetracked (this is a pretty crappy review so far; whatever, QOTSA's second album isn't so important to my life that I feel like rewriting the half hour of my life I've spent so far on this blogpost).  "Autopilot," possesses the shock of acoustic guitars (yeah for sonic variety!  I mean, HELL YEAH for sonic variety!).   Once again Homme makes the mistake of closing the album with a piano ballad, a musical genre for which he has no feel or ability for ("I Think I Lost My Headache").  Fuck no for sonic variety.  "Lightning Head," rips your head off with its heaviness like some great lost Black Sabbath IV outtake - hell, for all I know the riff is a Sabbath ripoff; it certainly sounds familiar, doesn't it, though I couldn't identify the source if Nick Oliveri himself offered to split his stash with me.  Mark Lanegan (ex-Screaming Trees) offers his soul-grunge vocals for the power-balladic "In the Fade," (actually sorta good - this sonic variety stuff is starting to work out after all).  "The Lost Art of Keeping," is a tightly rocking hard-poppy rocker; "Better Living Through Chemistry," is a spacey drugged-out psych-rocker; and "Monster in the Parasol," has a chorus as disappointingly goofy as you'd expect from the title (sigh, maybe that Blue Oyster Cult influence isn't so cool after all) - but it's a solid tune nonetheless.  There's really not much filler on this record - nearly all the tracks are worthwhile ("Tension Head," only lasts 34 seconds, so who cares?).         

Queens of the Stone Age - s/t

Queens of the Stone Age (1998) ***1/2

The secret to QOTSA is that they play heavy metal as if it were rock'n'roll again - real metal, not boppy hair-metal bullshit:  dry, heavy, complex, lyrically non-interested in standard boy-porks-girl fare.  Equal parts Sabbath, Hawkwind, Metallica, Blue Oyster Cult, Stooges, Hendrix, Kyuss (lead guitarist/vocalist and for all intents and purposes [as would be made clear on subsequent releases] dictator of these Queens, Josh Homme's former band), QOTSA do have a glammy side, but not nearly as much as their name and unfortunate LP cover might imply.  (God, I've got to review something, anything immediately after posting this review, simply to get that unsightly blemish off the intro to my site.)  Oh, and throw some Meat Puppets into that influence mix, willya?  I have no idea if Homme, bassist Nick Oliveri, and drummer Alfredo Hernandez (only here for one LP!  Catch'im while you if you care!) actually listened to the Kirkwood Bros. or not, but their music has the same red-eyed, dry, dusty feel as those other scions of the lonesome desert.  No doubt geography influences musical style, as 18th century ethnographers surmised that the skin colours and humours of the races of man were influenced by their native environments.  Having only heard one Kyuss album in glancing that left no great impression on me, I've been told that Homme's former band was more experimental and expansive, not to mention also including both Oliveri and Hernandez, which means that the only major lineup change was ditching Kyuss' douchebag singer.

BTW, ever noticed how "I Was a Teenage Hand Model," sucks?  I understand that a slice of quirky piano pop may seem like a necessary change of pace when all the other songs on the album sound exactly the same.  Well, not quite the same, but sonic variety this album has it not (aside from the general flow of starts-off-really-good but the material on the second half starts growing noticably weaker - the best songs are all frontloaded).  Some of the songs are faster (and therefore better) even if none of them chug along faster than mid-tempo, with the exception of "How to Handle a Rope," which is quite speedy and uncoincidentally by far the album's best song.  And some of the songs are slower and therefore draggier and therefore suckier.  Except for "If Only," because the riff and its interplay with the rhythm section are so darn interesting.  In fact, none of these riffs are, generally speaking, all that interesting in and of themselves:  it's the band interplay that elevates these heavy rockers to great rock'n'roll.  Have I mentioned how tight this band is?  Have I mentioned that they can play?  Well, maybe that's because every reviewer does.  Facts are facts.  These guys R-O-C-K in an objective sense.  If QOTSA don't make you, through sheer involuntary act of will, curl your fingers into a devil sign and nod your head in a banging rhythm like a slow motion epileptic fit, then I question the validity of your nervous system.  Facts are facts.  However, that's all QOTSA do or seem capable of, and if you're looking for something other, or more than headbanging heaviosity with impressively complex arrangements and jaw-droppingly tight playing, then seek ye elsewhere.