CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Review of Queens of the Stone Age: Lullabies to Paralyze

Saturday, June 25, 2005

this entry brought to you by radiohead, "dollars & cents"




An embarrassing fact about me: although I've bought dozens of debut albums from various bands before they'd released another, for some reason with my favorite bands, I always seem to get into them late. My first White Stripes record was Elephant, their fourth. My first Tool record was AEnima, their third. Hell, even my first Nirvana record was In Utero, their third.

When I heard my first Queens album, Songs for the Deaf, I couldn't understand for the life of me how the chrunchy, thrashy, tight songs with a few jammy rock-out excursions could be considered "stoner rock". Then when I went out and bought Rated R, their previous album, with its couple of long, weird, meandering drug songs like "I Think I Lost My Headache", I understood why the term would be thrown around. I still thought it was undeserved-- most of the record was still catchy, sing-along, dreamy hard rock, with the familiar freak-outs of bassist Nick Oliveri. Lullabies, singer/ guitarist Josh Homme's first Queens record without Oliveri, seems to be a step into Rated R territory. It's a little looser than Deaf, a little bit more druggy. It's also quite a bit darker and consciously arty, which is really saying something since Queens are about the artiest hard rock band not named Nine Inch Nails or Tool.

Unfortunately, this arty, druggier approach leads to the album's two mistakes, "Someone's in the Wolf" and "The Blood is Love", both songs with cool riffs and are conceptually interesting, but both go on for an unneccesary 7 minutes each, never really going anywhere, victims of the droning texture Homme strangely decided to lay over the vocals in every song on the record. Oliveri's shrieking slash-and-burns from the previous albums weren't exactly deep, nor highlights, but they lent the Queens an air of not-being-too-serious-about-this-whole-rock-thing devil-may-care attitude that this record lacks. One wonders what Lullabies might've been like if the 14 minutes of "Wolf" and "Blood" had been divvied up for Oliveri's grinning schizo outbursts.

And honestly, fourteen minutes is a long time to sit through a couple songs that start to lose you after a while, and this might've ordinarily been a deal breaker. Fortunately, when Homme isn't trying to get really, really deep with his longest songs, the man proves that he can write some of the best fuckin' songs in rock n' roll. "Little Sister" is the coolest song on the radio; cool like Fonzie, a sexy rock swagger with a curled lip and disaffected gaze. "Tangled Up in Plaid" is a head-bopping romp through self loathing riffs. "Burn the Witch" is a bluesy stomp through the mud, guest starring Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top (!). "Skin on Skin" and "You Got a Killer Scene There, Man" are fuzzy, grinding, sweaty sex songs for when the mosh pit turns into an orgy. "I Never Came" sounds like it might be a sophomoric joke, but turns out to be the most moving post break-up song of the year.

The list goes on. You can forgive Homme's rare moments of druggy self-indulgence-- even without his long-time bass playin' buddy, without the living stick of dynamite that is Dave Grohl on drums, even with old friend Mark Lanegan singing only one song (the opener, the quiet, mysterious "This Lullaby"), Homme has managed to make one of the best rock records since, well, the last time he made a rock record, Songs For the Deaf. It's not quite as good as that record, but somehow, Lullabies pushes Josh Homme's rock cred even higher.
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with love from CRS @ 5:55 PM 

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