FEATURE:
Time & Place
PHOTO CREDIT: Andreas Neumann
The Queens of the Stone Age Buyer’s Guide
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TOMORROW sees the release…
of Queens of the Stone Age’s eighth studio album, In Times New Roman… It is a great title for an album that sort of refers to the old Roman Empire, and how it is very much modernised and present in modern-day America. Also named after a particularly boring font type, there is something exciting, personal, powerful and emphatic about In Times New Roman… It is a sensational album from Queens of the Stone Age. It ranks alongside their very best. Because a new album is out, I want to go back and provide a buyer’s guide to Queens of the Stone Age. People may be new to them, so I will suggest the essential albums, an underrated one, plus the very best one (in my view). Before that, here is more detail about In Times New Roman…
“Queens of the Stone Age release their long-awaited 8th studio album, In Times New Roman... on Matador.
In Times New Roman... is raw, at times brutal and not recommended for the faint of heart. And yet, it’s perhaps the most beautiful and definitely the most rewarding album in their epic discography. Founder Joshua Homme's most acerbic lyrics to date are buoyed by the instantly identifiable QOTSA sonic signature, expanded and embellished with new and unprecedented twists in virtually every song. With In Times New Roman… we see that sometimes one needs to look beneath scars and scabs to see beauty, and sometimes the scabs and scars are the beauty.
Feeling a bit out of place, and having difficulty finding music they could relate to, the members of QOTSA did as they are wont to do: In Times New Roman… is the sound of a band creating the music its own members want to hear, while giving the rest of us a sonic forum in which to congregate. “The world’s gonna end in a month or two," sings Homme, begging the question: What do you want to do to with the time you’ve got left? Homme, Troy Van Leeuwen, Dean Fertita, Michael Shuman and Jon Theodore may not be able to save us, but they’re giving us a place to ride it out.
In Times New Roman… was recorded and mixed at Homme’s own Pink Duck (RIP), with additional recording at Shangri-La. The album was produced by Queens of the Stone Age and mixed by Mark Rankin. Artwork and double LP gatefold packaging designed by long time collaborator Boneface”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Andreas Neumann
Before getting to a review for In Times New Roman…, NME recently visited Queens of the Stone Age’s lead Josh Homme in California. He spoke about his personal struggles (including a divorce) and what we can expect from the new album. One of the most frank and refreshingly open artists out there gave insight into the band’s new phase and album:
“NME: Were there times when you thought you might not make another album?
Homme: “Kinda. I think when you’re dealing with the extreme ups and downs of life, you don’t stop and go: ‘I should really make a record.’ Those things don’t exist in that moment. If your roof is flooding, you don’t say: ‘We should make a record about this!’ You have to stop yourself drowning in a flood. We recorded it probably two-and-a-half years ago, but it just sat there waiting to be finished. I didn’t sing it until last November. I wasn’t done living. Honestly, I was probably afraid. I wasn’t ready. You need the flood to be over, and then you can decide whether you can accept the flood. I think with this being a record about acceptance, you need to actually get there yourself.”
NME: This record feels as direct and as personal as anything you’ve ever written, is that fair?
Homme: “Yeah, of course. That’s what this is. You start dropping the armour that protects you from your insecurities, and once you drop a piece of that armour you can’t put it back on. I think on this journey of Queens of the Stone Age, there’s no armour left. It’s only about walking deeper into the darkness. That’s the way it should be. Kowtowing to my own insecurities or fears at my age is not a good look. It should be more vulnerable, not less. I also think that a lot of people are making these tuned, to-the-click records that are trying to blend in with pop music. ‘We’re rock, but we’re kind of pop too, are you okay with that?’ We wanted to be like: ‘No, we’re going to make something that sounds as brutal as it feels to be alive right now.’”
NME: The title ‘In Times New Roman’ comes from closing track ‘Straight Jacket Fitting’, which alludes to similarities between modern-day America and the fall of Rome…
Homme: “There are so many reasons that it’s funny to me too. The most boring font being named after one of the greatest empires of all time! The place that brought you the vomitorium, the orgy and the vomitorium in the orgy! I also think it’s OK to acknowledge that Rome is burning and the Titanic is sinking. I don’t see a problem with that. In dealing with the concept of acceptance, you have to acknowledge reality. You can’t be kidding yourself.”
NME: On ‘Made To Parade’ you sing: “Give your best years away/To a bloated corporation/Who’ll work you like a slave/Best think twice”. Another relatable comment on our times?
Homme: “Selling you fear, to make you afraid, to box you in, so you’ll do what other people want – I’ve always despised that so much. Everyone’s selling it so hard now. My old man is always like: ‘I know you’re afraid, what does that have to do with it?’ Being afraid should be the thing that starts you doing something, not the thing that stops you from doing it. You run the gauntlet, but you do come out the other side. As long as you keep going.
“I kind of got obsessed with merry-go-rounds on this. Those keyboard parts. Did the merry really go round? Aren’t you really stuck on some wheel that’s telling you: ‘We’re having fun’, but after a while you’re like: ‘No I want to fucking barf, let’s get off this thing’? There’s a lot of sonic references to merry-go-round shit all over this record.”
NME: That sense of acceptance comes through on ‘Emotion Sickness’. Why was that the lead single?
Homme: “It’s a strange single. I don’t pick those, because I don’t care, but I was surprised because it’s such a Frankenstein’s monster of a song. The verse parts are all so grounded, and then the chorus is like taking a hang-glider and running off this cliff. We’ve never done a Crosby, Stills and Nash three-part harmony before. Again, that’s about as much about acceptance as you can get.”
You sing: “People come & go on the breeze/For a whole life? Possibly”
Homme: “I’m admitting I don’t fucking know. Are they going to be there forever? I don’t know. Some will, I guess? Once I realised it was about acceptance it was such a relief. ‘Lullabies to Paralyze’ is the Brothers Grimm fairytales, as a way of explaining things through that sort of eye. With [supergroup Them Crooked] Vultures it was all animals: elephants, lions, vultures, leeches. I get sort of fixated like that. I need to know what it’s about. It has to mean something. When I sang this, it was all by candlelight. Trying stuff and being like: ‘I’m afraid. I’m afraid to write this. I’m terrified.’”
NME: Why?
Homme: “Just because it’s so harsh. So much has gone on. It’s like… how’s this going to go? But then realising: ‘Oh shit, it’s about acceptance, no matter what it is.’ I was so relieved”.
Northern Transmissions provided their take on the new one from the mighty Queens of the Stone Age. Maybe not their absolute best, it is still an important and big album from a band who have remained inventive, forward-moving and excellent since their debut. I would suggest every Queens of the Stone Age fan goes and get this album:
There was and always will be a devilishness to Queens of the Stone Age’s grubby desert rock and their long-awaited 8th LP ‘In Times New Roman…’ maintains the group’s proclivity for the dark and macabre, with a liberal dose of catchiness. 6 years on from the Mark Ronson produced ‘Villains’, the Joshua Homme-fronted gang are back with a muscular stomp through the shadier enclaves of rock ‘n’ roll, that according to the outfit explores the blemishes and imperfections of life “with ‘In Times New Roman…’ we see that sometimes one needs to look beneath the scars and scabs to see beauty, and sometimes the scabs and scars are the beauty.”
Stylish, primal and sinister ‘In Times New Roman…’ is QOTSA embracing a raw brutality that’s not only represented by their sonic signature but the record’s artwork. A bequiffed rockabilly character is depicted with a leather jacket and slicked back hair that’s been possessed by a rabid wolf-like creature, as demonic hands with razor sharp claws encircle the album’s titular focal point. It’s as wicked and as sinful as you’d expect from a unit of outlaws peddling sleazy tunes that walk a fine line between good and evil.
If ‘Villans’ was the group’s embracing a rock ‘n’ roll playfulness, ‘In Times New Roman…’ is the fivesome ratcheting up the attitude for something altogether denser and meaner but not without a decent helping of hip-wiggling sassiness. Thematically, Homme’s lyrics appear to be left open to interpretation but with that, they reveal themselves to be, at times, personal barbs aimed at toxic behaviours and self-inflicted wounds. Opener ‘Obscenery’, with its thick, meaty sound has the totem pole-like frontman direct his ire at someone with self-destructive tendencies “self-help but you won’t help yourself/you must be pleased with the misery you’ve designed”. Notably, the record’s first track comes in hard with its full-bodied riffs and thunderous drums but it’s not a straight forward A to B rock song, as it meanders into a cinematic mid-section before circling back to a cacophonous din. With Homme as the record’s preacher, you’re guided through the world of ‘In Times New Roman…’ by his astute observations and cutting commentary; ‘Negative Space’s slow, guttural stomp captures the frontman in a reflective mood as he ruminates “we’ll never get back to where we were/starring into oblivion/oooo/it hurts” with a bellowed delivery.
‘What The Peephole Say’ comes out swinging with a shimmy and shake that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on ‘Villains’ and amongst the toe-tapping frivolity a message of impending doom pokes out between the cracks like weeds in a perfectly manicured flowerbed “I don’t care what the people know/the world’s gonna end in a month or so”. Then there’s the menacing rumble of ‘Made to Parade’ that depicts a subservient culture and seemingly a disparaging side eye aimed at life in the corporate machine “climb that ladder/you gotta hold your tongue” and “a bloated corporation/they work you like a slave” sound all too relatable for the cubicle, desk jockeys among us. ‘Time and Place’ is another track that showcases the band’s virtuosity, as the song evolves from stunted staccato to woozy psychedelia with a touch of the wild west as Homme observes a ne’er-do-well who’s rotten to the core “the space in your heart baby/it generates your hate” while describing this figure as someone who’d better watch their back “you’ve got a lot of nerve coming round this place/if you’re a pretty boy/you’ve got to save face”. ‘In Times New Roman…’ comes to a head via the sprawling nine-minute odyssey of ‘Straight Jacket Fitting’ which on the surface sounds eerie and demonic. It’s here where Homme exposes his fleshy vulnerabilities during the record’s final throes “hold me close/I’m confused and I wanna go out”. Sonically again, this is where the band switch multiple gears from beefed up rock to something the resembles medieval.
Times New Roman might be one of the most vanilla of font choices but make no mistake, the QOTSA LP of the same name is anything but ordinary. In fact, it’s a spicy sucker waiting tantalise your musical taste buds.
To celebrate some much-needed music from Queens of the Stone Age, below are the albums of theirs you need to know about. From their debut of 1998 (which is twenty-five in September), through to their latest, it is clear there is nobody in the music world…
QUITE like them!
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The Debut
Queens of the Stone Age
Release Date: 22nd September, 1998
Labels: Loosegroove/Roadrunner/Man's Ruin
Producers: Joe Barresi/Josh Homme
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/queens-of-the-stone-age/queens-of-the-stone-age
U.S. Chart Position: 122
Standout Tracks: Walkin on the Sidewalks/Mexicola/I Was a Teenage Hand Model
Review (Reissue):
“Well, first off this album was put out by three labels on its initial release, and now isn’t on any of them. Man’s Ruin, the label of poster artist Frank Kozik (whose sleeve design has been preserved for this reissue, and still looks godawful), and Stone Gossard’s Loosegroove have both since folded; Roadrunner, who released the CD outside of the States, have been inexplicably unfussed about keeping Queens Of The Stone Age in print, and have now ceded copyright to Homme’s own imprint, Rekords Rekords, in collaboration with Domino. (Another entity who look very different now than in 1998, when they probably never envisaged putting out a record by any American band who weren’t on first-name terms with Will Oldham, let alone this one.) So now you know.
Other changes of note are a full remaster, which has actually made a palpable difference to the plumpness of the bass in songs like ‘Hispanic Impressions’, and three extra tracks, all released on split EPs prior to this album coming out. They haven’t ruined it or anything daft, but also aren’t cooking at the level of most of the actual album, and would have been better placed on one of Homme’s jam-heavy and ‘zany’ Desert Sessions releases from the time.
Various ex-Kyuss types taking that band’s gargantuan, retro-metal foundations and building on them.
No, not really: even ‘various’, which implies more Kyuss personnel than Homme and drummer Alfredo Hernandez (Nick Oliveri wouldn’t become a member until 2000’s Rated R). The guitarist’s thick, valve-massaging tone didn’t radically alter from one band to the next, but QOTSA was evidently an outlet for him to play with structure, form and influence in a way Kyuss didn’t. A sly jangle amidst the semi-romantic psych-rock of ‘You Can’t Quit Me Baby’; ‘You Would Know’, as dually surreal and resigned as the Meat Puppets. Meanwhile, the songs you could see as a poppier redux of his old band – ‘Walkin’ On The Sidewalks’, ‘How To Handle A Rope’ – are just great, unfussy open-road hard rock burnups.
In amongst the massed banks of superheavy guitar is ‘Regular John’, which sounds like Black Sabbath covering Stereolab (honest!),
Basically, the above is saying that this kid hasn’t listened to Neu! yet, and not much Sabbath either for that matter, but if you can figure out that it means a super-strict motorik beat and some chuggy metal riffs, it’s done its job, as ‘Regular John’ features both those things. For my money, it’s still the best thing Queens have ever done, and the fact that it didn’t usher in a new and recognisable subset of heavy rock is no fault of theirs; more likely the fact that in the late Nineties, every town in Europe and North America had its own band gamely, fruitlessly trying to be as good as Kyuss by aping them.
and the dreamy tomfoolery and terrifying FX of ‘I Was A Teenage Hand Model’.
‘Terrifying’ might be stretching a point, but there is some dead loud Moog-y noise at the end of this song, the album’s closer, which might make you jump slightly if you’re not expecting it. Otherwise, matters are fairly dreamy, if only because Homme sings like he’s just woken up, and the electric piano and hand percussion wheeling him along isn’t much more energetic. It occupies the same position on the album as ‘I Think I Lost My Headache’ on Rated R, and is cut from a similar cloth.
Mmm, lovely.
Mmm, insightful. Circa 1998, though, Queens Of The Stone Age was a breed apart from almost everything else, as much as the year yielded scads of fine records. The fact it’s been frequently tricky to actually buy the thing makes it look a mite, how you say, Ipreferredtheearlierstuff to suggest it’s their career highpoint, but at the very least it contains several individual moments of outstanding achievement. It’s probably also helped by the fact that it recalls a time when to see a band list Queens Of The Stone Age as an influence wouldn’t have told you they were going to be shit, as it now does” – Drowned in Sound
Key Cut: Regular John
The Three Essential Albums
Rated R
Release Date: 6th June, 2000
Label: Interscope
Producers: Chris Goss/Josh Homme
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/queens-of-the-stone-age/rated-r-2
U.S. Chart Position: 16
Standout Tracks: Feel Good Hit of the Summer/Monsters in the Parasol/Tension Head
Review (Deluxe Edition):
“Everyone needs a mantra. For Josh Homme, Nick Oliveri, and the rotating cast of Queens of the Stone Age, it was short, catchy, debauched: "Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy, and alcohol." And for good measure: "C-c-c-c-c-cocaine." Over and over again. Sixteen times. For the first song on their second album it was a rallying cry, the perfect chorus, a clever verse, and a sort of philosophical exposition. But it was also a misnomer.
Rated R was tagged as stoner rock almost immediately upon release in 2000, in part because of those seven substances, but mostly because the band rose from the ashes of early-1990s Palm Desert sun gods Kyuss. Homme, a plangent, riff-obsessed guitarist, and Oliveri, a manic golem of a man and a mighty bass player, formed the backbone of that band with a mechanized sense of bang-and-smash structure. Studied repetition and precision are unlikely virtues for weedheads, but then these are unlikely musicians. When Homme formed the Queens after Kyuss disbanded, he carried that sense of exacting musculature with him but also brought a surprisingly seductive croon-- able to burrow low and also swing high into falsetto. After a modest, chugging self-titled debut, his frantic pal Oliveri joined the band.
What they forged was familiar but also wildly different from that stoner rock-- a term Homme has always rejected. In turn, they made one of the last great modern hard rock records and something deceptively tuneful, groove-bitten, and even melancholic. As soon as the mantra is laid bare, QOTSA begin to dance away, with things like "The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret", which amounts to a really great Blue Öyster Cult song, and the funk stroll of "Leg of Lamb". Suddenly a pattern, from mellow grace notes to head-smash riffs, sometimes colliding into each other, begins to set in.
Homme has never been much of a lyricist, preferring to weave in fragments of thought and word puzzles. Rated R is rarely about things, more often about feelings-- a chest-beating energy, a confusing head trip, or a dissipating sadness. Former Screaming Trees frontman and longtime Homme buddy Mark Lanegan began his relationship with the band on "In the Fade", an intoxicating and solemn song that has gone a bit unnoticed as the years have passed. Lanegan eventually became a full-time member of the band, but he was never better than the first time. When the song concludes, a reprise of the mantra kicks back in, a fitful reminder to shake the melodrama and remember the cocaine.
Ten years later, Rated R sounds vital, if a bit unusual. Credible hard rock is a tough sell these days. It's been three years since Queens released their last album, Era Vulgaris, and six years since Homme fired his old friend Oliveri-- a notorious party monster who consumed with vigor and often performed in the nude, his bass strapped across his crotch like a phallic totem. They grew bigger, recruiting Dave Grohl to play drummer and writing more riff beasts, but they've never been as fearless. To celebrate the decade since, the band has included the perfunctory bonus disc, with seven B-sides, including a goofy cover the Kinks' "Who'll Be the Next in Line", an even sillier Carly Simon parody called "You're So Vague", and a surprisingly sly take on Romeo Void's new wave classic, "Never Say Never". They've also tacked on a nine-song live set from the 2000 Reading Festival that features Homme hilariously saying, "This is a song for you," to the audience before four consecutive songs. Stoners.
But it's the unlikely things about Rated R that stick with you: The bongos that open "Better Living Through Chemistry"; Lanegan's existential wail on "In the Fade"; Rob Halford's backing vocals on "Feel Good Hit of the Summer". The gentle, acoustic interlude "Lightning Song" feels like a cold splash of sea water after Oliveri's scorched-earth demon screech on "Tension Head". There are no down or off moments here. "I Think I Lost My Headache" closes things with a squealing three-minute brass outro; it's a typically unexpected move from a band making a surprising leap. Rated R didn't defy convention because it didn't seem to have a working text. Only a mantra” – Pitchfork
Key Cut: The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret
Lullabies to Paralyze
Release Date: 22nd March, 2005
Label: Interscope
Producers: Joe Barresi/Josh Homme
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/queens-of-the-stone-age/lullabies-to-paralyze-1
U.S. Chart Position: 5
Standout Tracks: Everybody Knows That You’re Insane/Someone's in the Wolf/The Blood Is Love
Review:
“Before heading into the studio in early 2004 to record the fourth Queens of the Stone Age album, Lullabies to Paralyze, the band's guitarist/vocalist/chief songwriter, Josh Homme, kicked out bassist Nick Oliveri for undisclosed reasons. Since Homme and Oliveri were longtime collaborators, dating back to the 1990 formation of their previous band, Kyuss, this could have been a cause for concern, but QOTSA is not an ordinary band, so ordinary rules do not apply. Throughout their history, from Kyuss through Queens of the Stone Age's 2002 breakthrough Songs for the Deaf, Homme and Oliveri have been in bands whose lineups were as steady as quicksand; their projects were designed to have a revolving lineup of musicians, so they can withstand the departure of key musicians, even one as seemingly integral to the grand scheme as Oliveri -- after all, he left Kyuss in 1994 and the band carried on without him. Truth is, the mastermind behind QOTSA has always been Josh Homme -- he's the common thread through the Kyuss and QOTSA albums, the guy who has explored a similar musical vision on his side project the Desert Sessions -- and since he's wildly indulging his obsessions on Lullabies to Paralyze, even hardcore fans will be hard-pressed to notice the absence of Oliveri here. Sure, there are some differences -- most notably, Lullabies lacks the manic metallic flourishes of their earlier work, and the gonzo humor and gimmicks, such as the radio DJ banter on Deaf, are gone -- but it all sounds like an assured, natural progression from the tightly wound, relentless Songs for the Deaf. That album contained genuine crossover pop tunes in "No One Knows" and "Go With the Flow," songs that retained QOTSA's fuzzy, heavy neo-psychedelic hard rock and were channeled through an irresistible melodic filter that gave the music a serious sexiness that was nearly as foreign to the band as the undeniable pop hooks. Homme has pulled off a surprise of a similar magnitude on Lullabies to Paralyze -- he doesn't walk away from these breakthroughs but marries them to the widescreen art rock of R and dark, foreboding metal of Kyuss, resulting in a rich, late-night cinematic masterpiece. One of the reasons QOTSA have always been considered a musician's band is that they are masters of mood, either sustaining tension over the course of a six-minute epic or ratcheting up excitement in the course of a two-minute blast, all while using a familiar palette of warm, fuzz-toned guitars, ghostly harmonies, and minor-key melodies. While Lullabies is hardly a concept album, its songs play off each other as if it were a song cycle, progressing from the somber Mark Lanegan-sung opening salvo of "This Lullaby" and steadily growing spookier with each track, culminating in the scary centerpiece "Someone's in the Wolf." The key to QOTSA's darkness is that it's delivered seductively -- this isn't an exercise in shallow nihilism, there's pleasure in succumbing to its eerie, sexy fantasies -- and that seductiveness is all musical. Specific lyrics don't matter as much as how Homme's voice blends into the band as all the instruments bleed together as one, creating an elastic, hypnotic force that finds endless, fascinating variations on a seemingly simple sound. Simply put, there is no other rock band in 2005 that is as pleasurable to hear play as QOTSA -- others may rock harder or take more risks, but no one has the command and authority of Queens at their peak, which they certainly are here. They are so good, so natural on Lullabies to Paralyze that it's easy to forget that they just lost Oliveri, but that just makes Homme's triumph here all the more remarkable. He's not only proven that he is the driving force of Queens of the Stone Age, but he's made an addictive album that begs listeners to get lost in its ever-shifting moods and slyly sinister sensuality” – AllMusic
Key Cut: Burn the Witch
...Like Clockwork
Release Date: 3rd June, 2013
Label: Matador
Producers: Josh Homme/James Lavelle/Queens of the Stone Age
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/queens-of-the-stone-age/like-clockwork
U.S. Chart Position: 1
Standout Tracks: Fairweather Friends/Smooth Sailing/I Appear Missing
Review:
“Josh Homme and his all-star pals prove the virtue of taking your sweet time on a record that’s as self-assured as it is damn sexy. Most bands don’t leave their fans waiting six long years for a new album. They don’t then promote said record by getting a creepy robot to leave their fans unsettling voicemails. And they definitely don’t enlist a chef to write the album notes. But Queens Of The Stone Age aren’t most bands. As badass menu maverick Anthony Bourdain says in ‘…Like Clockwork’’s accompanying bumf: “[Josh] Homme has consistently demonstrated a business plan of not giving a shit.” The heroic frontman and kingpin of these desert titans might not care about industry whys and wherefores, but Josh Homme gives every single last fuck when it comes to crafting blow-your-mind-and-incinerate-your-crotch rock’n’roll.
As contemporary hard-as-nails guitar music’s most imposing figure – and not just because he stands at 6 foot 4, has a fondness for triple denim and looks like a pre-Raphaelite, Triumph-straddling Elvis – Josh has earned the right to do what the hell he wants. Thankfully, that’s gathering his world-beating buddies in his Pink Duck studio in LA and laying down an unrelenting juggernaut.
Much has been made already of the high-end guests. The core collaborators from QOTSA’s classic ‘Songs For The Deaf’ are scattered across the release, Josh once again motoring across the crest of Dave Grohl’s brutal drums with Mark Lanegan and Nick Oliveri popping up briefly to ride sidecar. Then there’s turns from Arctic Monkey Alex Turner, Scissor Sister Jake Shears, Nine Inch Nail Trent Reznor and, bafflingly, brilliantly, Sir Elton John. Not that you’d know any of this unless you were told. Their restrained assistance means there’s no danger of this turning into a sprawling, unfocused ‘Josh and friends’ record.
Considering their lengthy absence, to return with a double album would have been more than acceptable, but ‘…Like Clockwork’ comes in at a mere 10 tracks. The crap filter has been whacked up to 11 and the groove-o-tron set to interstellar for the band’s slickest offering to date. Al Turner slinks through the saloon doors for ‘If I Had A Tail’, a track predatory enough to warrant a restraining order. “I wanna suck/I wanna lick/
I wanna cry/I wanna spit”, growls Josh, against a grimy strip-bar swagger. It’s the perv-funk sound of drunkenly sinking into sticky leather couches for steamy make-out sessions in dimly lit Hollywood smut-pits.
The same filthy feeling abounds on the ferocious but perfectly polished ‘Smooth Sailing’. “I’m in flagrante/In every way”, confesses Josh, before adding, almost as an afterthought, “I blow my load over the status quo”. Quite. Yet there’s also a more meditative flipside to ‘…Like Clockwork’. ‘The Vampyre Of Time And Memory’ is a startlingly low-key piano hymnal, even with its flashes of Giorgio Moroder synths and cocaine-soul guitar solo. Its confessional lyrics, set against a twisted power ballad melody, come on like an even more fucked-up Fleetwood Mac. “Does anyone ever get this right?/I feel no love”, purrs Josh. ‘Kalopsia’, featuring Reznor, is another haunting slow jam, but pulls a flick-knife chorus on you, amping up the menace with eerie backing vocals that echo the melancholy “sha-bop- sha-bop”s of The Flamingos’ version of skulking doo-wop ode ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’.
‘…Like Clockwork’ closes with the title track, perhaps the least QOTSA-sounding song ever. If MGM are hunting the next Bond movie theme creator, this should swing it for Josh, as he indulges his dexterous falsetto, channelling the sweeping, string-laden ’60s scores of John Barry, with production help with the man from UNKLE, James Lavelle. Last year, Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil praised Queens Of The Stone Age for their ability to make sexy records. “Which I think is hard to do in a rock band,” he said. That’s because Queens Of The Stone Age aren’t most rock bands – they’re the rock band” – NME
Key Cut: My God Is the Sun
The Classic
Songs for the Deaf
Release Date: 27th August, 2002
Label: Interscope
Producers: Josh Homme/Adam Kasper/Eric Valentine
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/queens-of-the-stone-age/songs-for-the-deaf
U.S. Chart Position: 17
Standout Tracks: Go with the Flow/Do It Again/God Is in the Radio
Review:
“On their third album, Songs for the Deaf, Queens of the Stone Age are so concerned with pleasing themselves with what they play that they don't give a damn for the audience. This extends to the production, with the entire album framed as a broadcast from a left-of-the-dial AM radio station, the sonics compressed so every instrument is flattened. It’s a joke run wild, punctuated by an ironic mock DJ, and it fits an album where the players run wild. As usual, Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri have brought in a number of guests, including Mark Lanegan on vocals and Dean Ween on guitar, but they’ve anchored themselves with the drumming of the mighty Dave Grohl, who helps give the band the muscle sorely missing from most guitar rock these days, whether it's indie rock or insipid alt-metal. QOTSA may be a muso band -- a band for musicians and those who have listened to too much music; why else did the greatest drummer and greatest guitarist in '90s alt-rock (Grohl and Ween, respectively) anxiously join this ever-shifting collective? -- but that’s the pleasure of the band, and Songs for the Deaf in particular: it’s restless and pummeling in its imagination and power” - AllMusic
Key Cut: No One Knows
The Underrated Gem/For the Diehards
Era Vulgaris
Release Date: 12th June, 2007
Labels: Interscope/Rekords
Producers: The Fififf Teeners (Chris Goss and Josh Homme)
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/queens-of-the-stone-age/era-vulgaris-1
U.S. Chart Position: 14
Standout Tracks: Into the Hollow/Misfit Love/Suture Up Your Future
Review:
“I’M ONE OF a kind,” Josh Homme boasts on the new Queens of the Stone Age album. “I’m designer!” Well, that’s one way to put it. There aren’t any others like him, that’s for sure, and he’s never been an easy one to figure out. Here’s a rock star who seems to shuffle his band’s lineup as often as he shaves his back, yet who always sounds like himself, making fun of solemn art types but working harder than any of them. He manages to be the token metal dude for indie kids and the token punk for headbangers, without compromising for either camp. Homme makes music in all kinds of incarnations — the Queens, Eagles of Death Metal, his endless Desert Sessions projects. But he always seems to inhabit his own musical world, a zone where lost kids chase the desert acid-trip vibe of classic Seventies midnight movies like Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop. Really, the scene in Vanishing Point where the naked hippie chick cruises across the desert sand on her Harley, blasting Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen,” could be the starting point for every song on this album.
Era Vulgaris is Homme’s fifth Queens album, and like the others, it’s intricately crafted, meticulously polished and ruthlessly efficient in its pursuit of depraved rock thrills, with robotic rhythm machines like “Turning on the Screw” and “I’m Designer.” Last time, Homme got slept on with the excellent but underrated Lullabies to Paralyze — people were thrown off initially by its down-in-the-dumps mood, which may be why the music took longer to kick in for some fans. But Era Vulgaris is a lot cockier than Lullabies, clobbering you instantly with guitars louder and uglier than a psychedelic biker party at Joshua Tree’s Skull Rock. “Misfit Love” is the ultimate Queens anthem, all low-register guitar crunch, with a percussion track that sounds like tennis balls the size of Betelgeuse crashing into a Moog factory. Homme snarls, “I wanna see my past in flames,” and he gets his wish.
Supposedly, his party buddies at the Era Vulgaris sessions included Trent Reznor, the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas and regular guest Mark Lanegan. But none of them are really audible — are you surprised? Instead, we get the many moods of Josh Homme, most of which concern the miracle of physical love and the procurement thereof. He’s always said he wanted the Queens to be a band for the ladies, not the menfolk, and from the vocals to the bass lines this is his most crotch-tensive music. “Make It Wit Chu” is an old Desert Sessions song, revamped into a ridiculous lover-boy plaint, with Homme doing his sleaziest falsetto over a lounge-lizard cousin of Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” “Into the Hollow” is a surprisingly tender purple-haze ballad, with Homme’s vibrato amid a gently quivering wah-wah and the usual assload of bass. “Run Pig Run” is staccato jackhammer blues metal, “3’s and 7’s” sounds like prime Nirvana and “Sick, Sick, Sick” is manic punk riffing, offering “a lick on the lips and a grip on your hips.” All excellent news for Brody Dalle.
Homme is a man of many surprises. Here’s something you wouldn’t expect about Era Vulgaris: the influence of New Wave synth geek Gary Numan is all over this record. Even rave-ups like “Battery Acid,” “Suture Up Your Future” and “3’s and 7’s” have vintage-synth hooks copped from The Pleasure Principle — it may sound crazy, but if there’s one thing you should have learned about Homme by now, he’ll heist a badass riff from anywhere. In “I’m Designer,” he sings about his “generation” and means it, his fey falsetto a parody of hippie cosmic aspirations. But even though the joke is a great one, you hear that falsetto, and you realize it’s here for one main reason, just like every other sonic flourish on Era Vulgaris: Josh Homme loves how it sounds” – Rolling Stone
Key Cut: Sick, Sick, Sick
…The One Before In Times New Roman…
Villains
Release Date: 25th August, 2017
Label: Matador
Producer: Mark Ronson
U.S. Chart Position: 3
Standout Tracks: Feet Don't Fail Me/The Way You Used to Do/Head Like a Haunted House
Review:
“Queens of the Stone Age’s new album opens with a spot of self-mythologising. “I was born in the desert, May 17, in 73,” croons Josh Homme on Feet Don’t Fail Me. “When the needle hit the groove, I commence to moving / I was chasing what’s calling me.” Since the departure of frequently nude bassist Nick Oliveri 13 years ago, Queens have had a largely stable lineup, familiar to most listeners as Homme and some other blokes who could have “I’m in Queens of the Stone Age” tattooed on their foreheads and still provoke the question: “I’m sorry, what band are you in?” The myth-making is likely all Homme’s.
Over the course of Queens of the Stone Age’s 20-year career, he has been adept at making it clear what the band represent, and manipulating perceptions. Their breakout song, 2000’s Feelgood Hit of the Summer – whose entire lyrics were repetitions of “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol, c-c-c-c-c-cocaine” – helped create the image of chemsex desert vikings, riding out of the mountains on choppers to set up generator parties at which all attendees swallowed kilos of pills and had it off with anything that moved: man, woman or motorcycle.
Yet, for all the machismo of their image, Queens of the Stone Age have rarely actually sounded like that. “Rock should be heavy enough for the boys and sweet enough for the girls,” Homme once said, and there has always been something strikingly feminine about Homme himself. He might be tall, and undeniably less lithe than the average rock star, but his voice never snaps into the traditional rock snarl. He frequently ascends to a falsetto to supplement the croon; he sounds more like a glass of Baileys than a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, the only hard rock singer who audibly owes more to Mel Tormé than Rob Halford.
There’s also the fact that Homme would be be unable to maintain his insane work rate if he actually were spending all his time having it off. This is the seventh Queens album, and there have been four Eagles of Death Metal records, one with Them Crooked Vultures, 10 Desert Sessions EPs, a collaboration with Iggy Pop, assorted production jobs and more: 31 other collaborations of varying degrees of seriousness. Perhaps, then, “what’s calling me” is actually a strict Protestant work ethic rather than the open road, a woman and a bag of drugs.
Though QOTSA never employ the single-minded focus of Status Quo or the Ramones or AC/DC, you can be fairly sure that certain elements will recur, as they do on Villains. There will be robotic boogie (The Way You Used To), there will be a riff reduced to the point of barely existing (Domesticated Animals), there will be something doomily psychedelic (Hideaway). There will be nods to old heroes too, though this time it seems they weren’t summoned to the studio – they content themselves with briefly nabbing the guitar hook from Neil Young’s Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black), on Fortress.
The presence of Mark Ronson as producer hasn’t made a whole lot of difference (regular engineer Mark Rankin is in place anyway, and one suspects his contribution is substantial). There are bursts of synthesiser, but Queens of the Stone Age were always funky, so Ronson didn’t have to draft in horn sections and samples and attempt some grisly cut-and-shut of Uptown Funk and Regular John. Feet Don’t Fail Me, in particular, sounds like it could work on a dancefloor, a less brutish iteration of the kind of choppy minimalism that gave No One Knows such force.
The nearest Homme and co come to sounding unlike Queens of the Stone Age is on the closer, Villains of Circumstance, which erupts from a brooding, subdued verse into a sunlit shuffle of a chorus that recalls a beefed-up version of Tears for Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World. That reference alone provides the reason a Queens of the Stone Age album is of interest outside the worlds of denim and leather: they rarely see a song to completion for reasons of heaviness alone. There has to be melody, and Homme has the voice to support melodies substantially sweeter and more supple than hard rock normally deals with.
Queens of the Stone Age will never regain the shock value they had when Rated R came out, 17 years ago. But they don’t need to. Despite Homme’s self-mythologising, they long since ceased to be a desert rock band; they’re simply a great rock’n’roll group” – The Guardian
Key Cut: Domesticated Animals