(Credits: Far Out / Press)
The evolution of Queens of the Stone Age into one of the premier rock bands of the 21st century, and Josh Homme as a rock icon on the level of his on-again/off-again bandmate Dave Grohl, has been one of the very few unabashedly good things about modern rock. Especially because for a while there, it looked like Queens were nothing more than a few decent riffs wrapped around a ginger quiff.
Don’t get me wrong, Queens were cool as shit and Songs For The Deaf had some absolute ragers on it. No one could argue against that, and even if you could, you would point to the fact that the other great rock success story of the 2000s, Arctic Monkeys, were Queens devotees from the very beginning. They were shallow as a puddle, though, and for a period of time, that was kind of the joy of them.
Not every band needs to be Radiohead. Everyone needs music to get loose to, especially when it’s, in Homme’s immortal words, “heavy enough for the boys and sweet enough for the girls”. Queens were the best of both worlds, a group of musicians for whom the term “world class” was made for going all-in on making the coolest music possible. What’s not to love?!
Especially when you take into account that Queens was a follow-up project from a much stranger and more intense band. Kyuss were an incredibly promising group, one that, at one point, seemed poised to take stoner rock into the mainstream. When that particular ship wrecked spectacularly, one can imagine Josh Homme wanting to start a band where he was in charge and nothing was that deep.
The problem comes when that project stops being a fling and starts being a relationship. As the band closed in on a decade and Homme’s health problems began to become unignorable, something fundamentally changed about the band. Queens of the Stone Age stopped making music that began and ended with how cool it sounded and started making music with real emotional depth in the form of their 2013 masterpiece …Like Clockwork.
What’s interesting is that Josh Homme had already had a version of this journey much earlier in his career. In an interview with RVA magazine conducted in 2005, Homme talked about realising the need to put himself in his music via two of his favourite records ever made: two albums made by an artist with whom Homme himself would go on to work closely, Iggy Pop.
He said, “After Kyuss broke up, I got so into The Stooges and Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life and The Idiot. Those two records, I was like, ‘You want to know what I have to say, just see these records.’ They so particularly said what I wanted to say, I thought, ‘Well, what does anyone need my take for? I’ll talk to you guys later, bye.’ Then I realised that I need my say. There’s nothing I can do about if anyone else likes it or understands it or anything. Simply because I love music and have to play, it doesn’t matter that it has been said a million times. It hasn’t been said by me.”
It may have taken a few more years for Josh Homme to really start saying things he couldn’t take back on Queens of the Stone Age records, but the foundations had been laid before. All he needed to do was step up to the plate, and making one of the best rock records of the century is a hell of a way of doing that.
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