Judging by his public appearances, Josh Homme has been on a personal and creative journey in recent years. He’s revealed his vulnerable side on podcasts like Jake Shears’s Queer The Music, appeared on the kitschy UK reality show Gogglebox (also alongside Shears), and made his runway modeling debut, his cheekbones having been impressively sharpened in middle age. He seems, deliberately or otherwise, to project a more complex yet approachable character than his brusque, no-nonsense desert-rock schtick might have suggested in the past.
I am hardly the first person to have noticed this shift in public image from Homme, and this is not the place to speculate upon its motivations, or the ways in which it might be complicated by events in the 53-year-old’s past (although I would encourage others to consider the points raised by Laura Snapes in this Guardian piece from September). Rather, as this is a review above all else, I mention this context to help me make sense of Perfecth, the new album from his band Queens of the Stone Age.
It’s not an easy task: as a longtime fan who’s nonetheless often been exasperated by Homme and Queens of the Stone Age, I find Perfecth weird. At their best, QOTSA are one of the most efficient mainstream rock bands on the planet, boiling each riff and rhythm down to its most potent essence, with Homme as the laconic focal point. They’re also a group that tends to excel at the extremes, at their best when totally possessed by either a monstrous aggression (“You Think I Ain’t Worth Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire”) or slinky, bleary-eyed desire (“Make It Wit Chu,” “I Sat By the Ocean”). They don’t really do subtlety, despite Homme’s recent protestations, and that’s what makes them so refreshing.
In contrast, Perfecth spends most of its time neither embracing Queens of the Stone Age’s extremes nor refining its constituent parts to their leanest, most muscular form. Much of the record is decidedly mid-tempo and oddly quote-unquote “respectable,” with a neat interplay of guitar and keys integrated into unshowy drumbeats and Homme’s self-consciously reflective balladeering. The frontman’s languid vocal has often provided the perfect counterpoint to QOTSA’s smoke-belching instrumentation; here, the arrangements match it rather than test it, making the effect more politely harmonious than productively tense.
This album isn’t poorly constructed. The playing is immaculate, the production precise, and Homme’s songwriting benefits from this newfound light-and-dark contrast. The lamplit atmosphere of opener “It’s Only Love,” for example, has a woozy allure, and its suggestive string arrangement adds a welcome new shade to the band’s timbral palette; closer “Runaway From The Mob,” meanwhile, has hooks with genuine staying power and grace.
Yet so much of the record in between just sort of plods along unobtrusively. “Sunday” is nice enough, but you’ll forget it as soon as it’s over; “Easy Street” is anonymous AOR that could have padded out an FM radio playlist of your choice at any point over the last fifty years; “Where The Goth Girls At” is probably the record’s most direct attempt at the sexy, instinctive cactus-rock that made Queens of the Stone Age’s name in the first place, but until a brief acceleration in the final thirty seconds, it feels as half-baked as its title.
“Mono” is probably the best moment here: Homme’s vocal line is genuinely elegant and positioned perfectly in the middle of an unsettling yet addictive cycle of explorative guitars and restless percussion. Yet it’s a rare moment of focus amidst a competent but unsatisfying collage of just-about-adequate ideas. More to the point, who listens to this band for “tastefulness” or “competence” anyway?
It would be unreasonable to outright accuse Queens of the Stone Age of trying to engineer their output to better suit Homme’s new image as a flawed, battle-scarred but ultimately well-intentioned rock-and-roll elder statesman. Clearly, there’s other stuff going on here, and it’s impossible to know the extent to which Homme’s recent publicity drive is as deliberate or cynical as some commentary (including parts of this review) might imply.
But it’s hard not to notice the parallel between his personal and musical trajectories; harder still to escape the feeling that if Josh Homme wants to be seen as mature and serious these days, having moved on from the machismo and recklessness of his younger years, Perfecth makes at least a degree of sense as the musical expression of this desire. It’s not necessarily a bad intention, and whatever Homme’s shortcomings, he is an artist of undeniable invention and charisma; yet, despite that talent, such qualities are in fairly short supply on Perfecth. [Matador]
Luke Cartledge is a journalist, researcher and musician. He lives in south-east London and writes about underground music, radical politics and cultural change. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Jacobin, Tribune, The Quietus and many other publications, and he is a former editor at Loud And Quiet.