ALBUM REVIEW; QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE- ERA VULGARIS

Queens of the Stone Age- Era Vulgaris
4/5
Interscope Records

“My generation’s for sale,” snarls Josh Homme in the fifth record of his project (for lack of a better term) Queens of the Stone Age. “It beats a steady job.” Well, that’s for sure.

Homme treads new ground on this record: we dig even deeper into the nether regions of his mind, where the acid mixes with the pot, mushrooms with the c-c-c-cocaine!!! The psychadelia is everywhere.

He has called it dark and electronic, and apparently “sort of like a construction worker.” We are experiencing a new kind of cool—unabashed ultra-masculinity, but sleazy and dirty enough to bring the girls in too.

The cool manifests itself in the texture and feel of the record. Not only does it want you to be listening to it while in a 1970’s-era muscle car, you have to be chasing someone at 100mph in the Dodge Avenger from “Death Proof,” which itself is homage to “Vanishing Point,” the ultimate car-chase movie.

Robotic guitar riffs are at the skeleton of the record. “Turning On The Screw” gets caught in its own riff, which loops, crescendos, and seems to be skipping for almost two minutes, but that’s your mind being dragged through the mud. “3’s and 7’s” is an inverted Nirvana blast.

Like any Queens album, there are all sorts of special guests, but you’d never know it, since you can’t hear them. Julian Casablancas of The Strokes plays a Casio synth guitar and sings backing vocals on “Sick, Sick, Sick,” but it is impossible to hear him over Homme’s jagged guitar racket.

Interestingly, the title track featuring Trent Reznor was cut from the album, but you can find it anywhere on the Internet, because Homme sent it to everyone on his mailing list with a message encouraging members to “upload it and spray it like time released graffitti (sic) on the websites of places it does not belong."

Where former bassist Nick Oliveri’s presence was sorely lacking on the previous release Lullabies to Paralyze, it is not nearly as apparent here. Yes, the crazed melodic foil to Josh’s cool is gone, but in its place is something truly depraved, just as Oliveri would have wanted.