For many of us who have a faint aversion to heavy rock, Queens Of The Stone Age have long occupied a strange loophole. On paper, they ought to repel: the bulldozing riffs, the desert-rock machismo, the leather-jacketed sneer. And yet the songs slip past the defences. Beneath the fuzz and menace, Josh Homme has always had the instincts of a classic pop craftsman making MOR in disguise \u2013 decisive chord changes, gleaming hooks, tight structures, middle-eight pay-offs \u2013 dragged through a heavy-rock filter and left out in the sun to warp.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s true of their biggest songs. \u201cNo One Knows\u201d has the melodic snap of vintage radio rock; \u201cGo With The Flow\u201d turns motoric velocity into power-pop; \u201cMake It Wit Chu\u201d, for all its leer, is essentially a soft-rock seduction ballad. On their most recent stadium tour, QOTSA\u2019s walk-on music was \u201cAfternoon Delight\u201d by the Starland Vocal Band, and much of their new album, Perfecth, seems weirdly reminiscent of that guiltiest of guilty pleasures.<\/p>\n
The two singles suggest its range. \u201cEasy Street\u201d is a deceptively sunny piece of major-key flamenco, built around acoustic guitar and handclaps, with outlaw country singer Nikki Lane shadowing Homme\u2019s vocal. The lyric, however, is a catalogue of emotional dysfunction: drinking, violence and self-sabotage offered as jokes by a narrator who knows he is his own worst enemy. \u201cInsignificant Other\u201d is more sumptuous: Wurlitzer piano, funky guitar, falsetto vocals and 1970s chord changes wrapped around a break-up song. Homme sneers at his ex\u2019s \u201cpsychobabble\u201d and birth charts, but eventually arrives at something almost tender: \u201cLetting go of you is beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n
That pattern repeats across Perfecth. Homme\u2019s lyrics are often as sardonic and surreal as ever, but the cynicism increasingly feels like self-protection. Underneath are lonely narrators who want connection and are embarrassed by how much they need it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s Only Love\u201d opens the album as a comically doomy, drumless tango, embroidered with sighing violin. Its narrator imagines himself throwing himself under trains (as field recordings of trains rattle past us), then dismisses the cause with a shrug: \u201cIt\u2019s only love.\u201d \u201cPhantom Limb\u201d, by contrast, is a sturdy major-key rocker, full of country harmonies and chunky grunge chords, but its emotional core is startlingly plain: \u201cI need help\u201d, \u201cI need you here\u201d. The missing person becomes the phantom limb \u2013 gone, but still felt.<\/p>\n
Other songs approach dependence from different angles. \u201cFrom The Cliff\u201d, built around clawhammer-style acoustic guitar and close harmonies, is the most naked love song here, all sunlight, skin and a shared leap \u201cfrom the cliff of love into the blue\u201d. \u201cMono\u201d is woozier: a dreamy jazz waltz hovering on a single major-seventh chord while strings and keyboards drift around it. Its imagery is cryptic but the plea is simple: come home, don\u2019t leave me alone.<\/p>\n
Even the fuzz-bass-heavy \u201cWhere The Goth Girls At?\u201d, which has the title of a novelty song, is more affectionate than mocking. Its suburban goths apply make-up at the mall, smoke cloves, lace themselves into corsets and vomit while somebody holds back their hair. They are inventing their identities because ordinary life is too sterile to bear: \u201cNever felt so alive as the day I almost died\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cSunday\u201d broadens the frame. Originally written for Iggy Pop\u2019s Post Pop Depression, a 2016 LP co-written and produced by Homme, it is essentially a late-1970s Bowie pastiche: with clipped Carlos Alomar-style guitar, grinding George Murray-esque bass, pounding toms and Homme dropping into his best Bowie baritone. The lyric turns from romance to work and consumerism: the narrator\u2019s house is \u201cas slick as a senator\u2019s statement\u201d, his job \u201ca masquerade of recreation\u201d. Sunday becomes the one day on which he does not have to prove himself.<\/p>\n
The closer, \u201cRun Away From The Mob\u201d, builds from a stark guitar figure into a minor-key rocker driven by a Motown beat (courtesy of Dave Grohl, a vestige from the Like Clockwork sessions from 2013). The lyric attacks tribalism, public shaming and collective punishment. Yet this is not so much a lecture on cancel culture but a celebration of attachment: against the mob\u2019s appetite for rejection comes a private promise of loyalty.<\/p>\n
Homme\u2019s characters sneer at love, work, therapy, sobriety and society, only to keep discovering the same embarrassing fact: they need other people. The sarcasm is camouflage. So, increasingly, is the heaviness. These songs are full of distorted bass, big riffs and deadpan menace, but all come with a 1970s studio rock sheen: you can imagine much of this drifting from a Californian car stereo in between Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Queen and the Doobie Brothers. The music keeps revealing the emotional truth that the lyrics are trying to disguise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For many of us who have a faint aversion to heavy rock, Queens Of The Stone Age have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379573,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-379572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}