Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri, the two permanent and founding
members of Queens Of The Stone Age, are absolutely correct when they
condemn the easy categorization of their music as “stoner rock.” Their mode of
attack is too focused for the chemically altered mind. QOTSA love to
do things over and over — as much as they love the awkward rhythm,
the distorted crunch of the guitar and bass, the faux-operatic vocals
soaring over and diving under the constant, changeless din, they are wedded
for life to the old-time rock game of tension-and-release.
True stoners would have a lot of trouble with this kind of steadiness. They
are usually too forgetful and impatient to do anything more than once without
losing their train of thought, so Phish-y improvisation or Pink Floyd gloss are much
more pleasurable and comforting. And although QOTSA have their arty side, they
do not improvise much. They are perfect road-trip rock in their combination of
miles of static punctuated by startling diversions, and their pleasures are as
tried-and-true as a classic Harley-Davidson chopper. This is a band that should definitely see
if Lemmy Kilmister has some free time to jam.
So why do they find such joy in repetition — even more, it seems, than most
of their hard-rock peers? And why has it proven such a successful commercial
formula for them? Part of the answer to these questions is that the band came along
right around the messy rebirth of commercial metal and was different
enough to attract a less pained and cartoonish following.
And part of it has to do with being in the right place at the right
time. They may not last, but the band sounds
necessary now because its flat, dark music
reflects a flat, dark moral and economic climate. It’s
been done before: The embrace of repetition as a reaction
against industrial and ethical ennui is also found in the works of
Ozzy-era Black Sabbath and the first two Stooges albums. Both of
those bands came from working-class wastelands, and both were adept
at playing stupid — Sabbath’s drummer couldn’t hit more than
one drum in his kit at one time, and two songs in a row on the Stooges’
near-perfect testament Fun House are exactly the same but at slightly
different speeds. Yet their howling, inchoate pessimism has aged better
than many of their contemporaries, from MC5 to the mighty Led Zeppelin.
It may seem strange to pin this kind of worldview on a superficially
arty-smarty band that takes pride in patching little tiny touches of Spanish
guitar, organ, and xylophone in among sky-high guitar fissures. What unites
all three bands is their rage against the sameness and blandness of it all. For
the Stooges, life was no fun. For Sabbath, tomorrow’s dream never became
reality. For Queens Of The Stone Age, well, radio emptiness may or may not strike them as
a larger symptom of cultural decay. The years may yet burn off the ambiguity and
reveal the targets of their hoarse howling.
Then again, maybe not. Their last hit single,
“No One Knows,” is either a druggy paean to the secret thrills of sleeping pills or
a lovelorn lament, but the two-step, tick-tock lurch and the exploding chorus
keep the single fresh and surprising after a hundred listens. The same was true of
Rated R‘s “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” with its mantra of low-budget drugs,
and “Monsters in the Parasol”‘s stalker riff and dizzy-spell bridge. There is nothing
exactly inviting about this kind of music, though there also isn’t any of the
posturing and misery-drenched contortions typical of so many heavy rock bands of the
moment. In fact, QOTSA’s restraint and unwillingness to dive into self-loathing or
rise to coherence lend their work a class not shared by alternative-metal peers.
They sound pissed, and maybe they are pissed because they have nothing to say. No
one knows, but whatever they are saying, they continue to say it again and again.
Which isn’t to say the band hasn’t evolved with each fresh lineup. However,
evolution is too strong and dangerous a word for a hard-rock band that prizes set
patterns. As a collective, QOTSA don’t evolve their sound as much as their sound
mutates from album to album. Their eponymous debut recalls a faster, gloomier
Screaming Trees and a penchant for irritating noise, but it also has ready-made classics
like “If Only” and “Regular John.” The follow-up, 2000’s
Rated R, might be the best record they’ve released so far, downplaying the pummeling rock with some
gorgeous ballads that evoke a simpler, less gangly Meat Puppets. Last fall’s
Songs for the Deaf is a partial concept album about bad radio whose high points are the lead-off
“You Think I Ain’t Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire,” an
absolutely lethal Dave Grohl drum solo on “Song for the Dead,” a
follow up to Zeppelin’s “Gallows Pole” that we’ve
been waiting for for 30 years (“Hanging Tree”),
and a florid orchestral ode to the common mosquito. Its charms still unfold, though
the loused-up production grates.
And even though all-world drummer Grohl is no longer keeping time, the
best reason to see them live is to hear the best tracks from
Songs for the Deaf freed from the flat production of the album, which seems to mash everything into a tiny
little monochromatic ball no matter how much the stereo is turned up. With the
brakes off, the show should prove whether this band’s noise is heavy or hollow.
