Jueves 19 Ago 2010, 17:32
Josh Homme and Dave Grohl have reunited a good seven years after working together on the best Queens of the Stone Age album, Songs For The Deaf, and they've joined with a legend, Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, to fill out the rest of the rhythm section. Theoretically, something good should be coming out of this partnership. And that's despite the fact that this is a supergroup, for Josh and Dave are highly experienced with side projects. In practice, something good DOES result, which is Them Crooked Vultures! The real question, then, is HOW good?
So, the first thing about Them Crooked Vultures: they're NOT the Queens in different clothes, though some songs still display unmistakably QOTSA-like qualities (for example, Elephants shares the fast intro-slow midsection-fast outro setup done on Queens' Song For The Dead; Bandoliers and Spinning in Daffodils have somewhat of a Lullabies To Paralyze feel to them). You see, what makes QOTSA what they are is its meticulous nature, with lots of attention so obviously spent on musical frills and tooling around with the sound. In comparison, the songs of Them Crooked Vultures sound like they were put together quickly with a minimal amount of time sweating details. The final result of this is straightforward rock n roll to a degree that QOTSA would never be - think about it like older Beatles vs. newer Beatles. The hands-off approach works both for and against the songs, in my opinion. On one hand, I really like how lively the hands-off approach makes the performances sound, and it highlights the impressive instrumental chops of everyone involved. But on the other hand, I also get the feeling that some of it could be markedly improved with Queens-style tooling.
The what-if speculation isn't a big deal, however, because ultimately, with the exception of the sleep-inducing second half of Warsaw Or The First Breath You Take After You Give Up and the meh Caligulove, the songs are overall great stuff in their own right, with the best being stellar. Right off the bat, No One Loves Me & Neither Do I is a catchy little number for its first half, but most of its brilliance lies after the bridge, when it transforms into a musical hammering with tricky time signatures. Dead End Friends has a brisk pace and some especially nice guitar tones. Bandoliers is dreamy, especially with its main verse riff and the second part of its chorus. Reptiles sounds as wonky as the circus suggested in the lyrics, along with having my favorite line in the whole album ("Questions are a fire that needs feeding/So just you let those flames die down.").
The absolute best songs, however, are the most fun ones - New Fang is laced with irrepressible bounciness, Elephants kicks off with a killer rifftastic intro before going into a slow Take Me Out-style stomp, Gunman flattens everything around its dance beat with rapidfire wah-wah riffage, and all three sound like they could have been made with Rock Band or Guitar Hero playing in mind.
So, the answer to the real question from before: it's more than good. It's pretty damn GREAT.