For a brief moment back there in the innocent days of 2017, it sounded like all was (relative) sweetness and light in the Queens of the Stone Age universe. Well, those days are over, with the retreat from the shinier sound of the Mark Ronson-produced Villains in full effect on the gladiatorial In Times New Roman.
This is the sound of mainman Josh Homme delving down and disappearing into the process and emerging with an animal howl of an album, created against a backdrop of loss – of friends such as the prematurely departed Taylor Hawkins and his old Queens vocal foil Mark Lanegan and of his marriage to Brody Dalle, with custody arrangements turning nasty.
Homme appears to have harsh, withering words for Dalle on Paper Machete – “you speak lioness and damsel in distress so fluently” – while Negative Space laments “we’ll never get back to where we were”. Recent single Emotion Sickness sums up the personal trauma in the language of the blues – “baby don’t care for me, had to let her go…people come and go on the breeze” – with Homme hamming up the delivery one moment, then helming some horizontal harmonic hooklines the next.
Carnavoyeur mines something of the melodrama of another Queens associate Iggy Pop, there is a touch of Bowie on the barrelling What the Peephole Say and Homme sounds just like former Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell as he spits out a catalogue of objects of derision on 9-minute closer Straight Jacket Fitting, which opens with sultry swagger and breaking glass and comes round to an acoustic psych rock coda. There is just enough room for his fellow Queens to provide their taut support throughout to his distorted but efficient onslaught of riffola.
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