Queens Of The Stone Age
Era Vulgaris

THE REVIEW

And so we lost them too.

Indeed, having reached the fifth album, QOTSA confirm all the perplexities that had been raised with the previous "Lullabies...". Not even the future looks bright: the overall monotony of the work leaves no room for optimistic forecasts. Josh Homme, convinced he has invented a style, the so-called robotic rock, continues to repeat the same old riffs incessantly, without any break. But having your own compositional signature and your own guitar playing method is not enough to produce good records. Especially if all five are the same.

Try, for example, listening to "Battery Acid": don't you immediately feel like skipping to the next track, knowing full well what the intro will be like? Occasionally, Homme saves himself at the last minute, like with "Made it wit chu", the song that follows "Battery Acid". The problem is that we've already heard it in a 'Desert Session'. The fact that our guy ends up with something worthwhile only when replaying a song already recorded during the sessions at Rancho De La Luna says a lot about his current songwriting vein. The only other track that seems interesting to me is "Suture Up Your Future", which, paradoxically, is the piece that most deviates from the usual QOTSA sound, being a nocturnal ballad à la Morphine.

One of the terrible things is that, on first listen, after a few minutes of boredom, I started listening to the songs with the immense Mark Lanegan on vocals, namely "Into The Hollow" and "River In The Road" hoping to find solace. Nothing, even those I had already heard. I believe one of the problems is the constant lineup changes. By now this is the Josh Homme Band: without strong personalities to counter the leader, like Nick Oliveri once did, or John Garcia in Kyuss, everyone just executes the little task proposed by the boss. So much so that guests like Julian Casablancas and Trent Reznor, the first in "Sick, Sick, Sick", the second in the bonus track of the U.K. version of "Era Vulgaris," just settle for doing some backup vocals, for which the singer of Negramaro would have sufficed.

So dear DeBaserists, for someone who already felt orphaned by the breakup of the killer Kyuss, what is there left to do? Where to find the sacred fire of rock'n'roll? Here it seems quite extinguished to me.