Queens of the Stone Age
(Interscope)
Queens of the Stone Age shouldn’t be allowed to make an album this good. They shouldn’t have the right. This is, after all, seven years after rock ’n’ roll lost its grip on youth culture (that would be October ’95, when the Smashing Pumpkins blew their Mellon Collie load on American kids and Coolio’s "Gangsta’s Paradise" offered an umbrella). This is the year when guitar-desperate critics gave Andrew W.K. a shot, when one of hard rock’s founding fathers met success as a Mr. Burns stand-in. It’s just cruel to put out a great rock album now; there’s no audience for it.
Then again, maybe that’s the perfect scenario for Josh Homme, guitarist/vocalist/principal genius behind Queens of the Stone Age. (He’s tempered by a more warped, speedy genius in bassist Nick Oliveri.) Homme has never had any audience. In 1990, when he founded Kyuss and cranked out a trio of classic albums that birthed the term "stoner rock," he got buried opening for Metallica in Australia. In 1997, when Kyuss died and he tried to make more focused, accessible "robot rock" with Queens of the Stone Age, he got noticed by precisely one guy: Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam, who put out his band’s self-titled debut (1998). When he tried to find an audience at Ozzfest ’99, he got dirt thrown at him. When he tried to find an audience at Rolling Stone, he sold 75,000 copies of Queens of the Stone Age’s sophomore album, Rated R. So Songs for the Deaf suddenly seems like an appropriate title.
Then again, part of the album really is for the deaf. Track one, "A Real Song for the Deaf," features about 1:30 of low-frequency noise that even deaf people can feel ringing their ribcages (big speakers required). It’s an annoying but funny opener—as with Beck and Tool, humor has always been an important part of the Queens’ music. And just as the joke is getting tiresome, the rock kicks in.
There’s a concept here. See, since Queens can’t get any radio play, Songs for the Deaf is constructed as a personal radio station: after every couple tunes, a DJ comes on to hype Queens of the Stone Age. The DJs span all styles: "Kip Kasper" from "WCLON—Clone Radio" in L.A. announces that "We play the songs that sound more like everyone else…than anyone else," while "Elastic Ass" from "Chino Hills" shills for "KRDL—The Curdle." The skits are funny, poignant and necessary for what the band is trying to do: sew up the very loose ends of rock and encapsulate the four personalities responsible for the music.
Everybody has something to prove here. Homme, as previously mentioned, gets his last chance to succeed in the major-label world. He comes armed with his tightest, quirkiest material since Kyuss, and none of the overt begging to mainstream audiences that clouded his last effort. Oliveri tries desperately to keep pace, offering ear-shredding screams and short, attention-spanless gems like "Six Shooter"—if anyone’s going to bring rock into the 1:30 pop format, Nick Oliveri is. Then there’s Dave Grohl, playing drums on his first record since the Foo Fighters’ The Colour and the Shape (1997) and surpassing even his In Utero work. Finally, Mark Lanegan sings on three or four tunes, landing his gorgeous voice in its first rock band since Screaming Trees and making his growls purr. (By the way, guess who played guitar on Screaming Trees’ last tour? Josh Homme. Such a cluster-fuck.) They say you can’t make masterpieces by committee, but hearing these musicians try to outdo each other—to be king DJ—is what makes Songs for the Deaf so fresh.
Homme is the winner, though. His singing, which only began on the first Queens album and which has improved immensely with each release, is now totally beautiful, sort of like a Southern Rivers Cuomo with a more pussy falsetto. It’s an unexpected top to some bottomless riffing, but Homme is finally confident enough to pull it off, and when he throws in a harmony, like in the incomparable "First It Giveth," he does a pretty fine job encompassing the human condition. It doesn’t hurt that he’s singing "First it giveth/Then it taketh away."
Grohl shows his chops at the beginning and end of "A Song for the Dead," which is thrilling: Lanegan sings on it, and there are about five fake endings. Oliveri, meanwhile, makes "Gonna Leave You" a throwaway garage gem; you really believe him when he says, "You’re out of my high chair/I’m out of your womb." Wombs make a notable appearance later in the record when the surprisingly un-pushy title track is introduced by an unexpected DJ—your mother.
Somehow, by the end of track 15, when guest star Dean Ween is telling us that "We all will feed/The worms and trees/So don’t be shy," this collection of inside jokes and seemingly hired guns is looking like the best rock album since Mellon Collie lost everybody. Will it get everybody back? Of course not. But if you like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Beatles or the Doors (the music, which I haven’t bothered to describe, is right in the middle there, with a little more Nirvana than Beatles), buy Songs for the Deaf and see what happens. You’ll grow to love even the parts that are bad.
