Will have Queens of the Stone Age from is “In Times New Roman” his deserved place on the rock podium? How many bands that emerged in the 90’s are in a position to be considered classic? It is that once again, as it has been happening since 1998, they released an album with chicha, lemonade and now they added extra bile, suspicion and distrust in the form of riffs and larger-than-life melodies.
Just one listen is enough to reach the conclusion that if Josh Homme’s life is full of tribulations it can be a bitch for him, but -said this with total respect- how much good they do for his music! The red-haired giant works like hell and the traumatic situation he went through with his ex-wife, her cancer diagnosis and the deaths of his loved ones Mark Lanegan and Taylor Hawkins, helped make this album that powerful. . A plaque that flags pain and its (attempt to) liberation. An album that plays in the first division of records by force of spite and empty existence to which must be added the fact that the band’s formation has been stable for some time. Another factor in favor of this level of effectiveness and solvency.
But let’s get down to the details of this melodic and dusty laborious tour. “In Times New Roman” is a work that embraces the group’s past -it has the darkness of “Like Clockwork”the hook “Era Vulgaris”, the psychotic blues of “Lullabies To Paralyze”- and projects it by force of freshness; here the music of Josh Homme and his crew can deservedly hang the envied nickname of timeless.
The successes are numerous, from those heroic riffs that continue to move -even with the pressure of competing internally with those that Homme created for previous albums- to some impeccable vocal arrangements: theatrical and guttural falsettos that smell of damp tobacco, all surrounded by harmonizations that They turn each song into a potential hit. By the way, will Josh Homme ever be valued as a vocalist in the way that he really deserves?
“Obscenity” it attacks like a retro-futurist locomotive that lacks a set-up, but that still, by force of trade, takes what it finds in its path ahead. The heartbreak in love opens its prominence with a master phrase, sung in perfect falsetto, as if interpreted by a chorus of parrots on acid “Isn’t it a bit strange to pretend to be awake? Do you think we will break like a slap in the face?”
“Paper Machete” is the evolved sister of the enormous “If Only” from the debut album. Inspired guitar solo and minimalist gestures that magnify the legend; here a simple unison hit of base tom and snare drum makes it all make sense, the rest is an extra privilege.
In third place, “Negative Space” bites with a cutting riff and a letter that flirts with space and its cosmic delirium but at the end of the day talks about what the entire album: despair and resentment deluxe.
“Time & Place” it is a sample of suitability in the art of making a rock song without falling into conventions. The guitar play answering with certainty and the exact hit in each intention of the drums of the talented Jon Theodore, build a hallucinatory hit that paves the way to the anxiety-inducing “Made To Parade” where Homme becomes a kind of Bowie mistrusting pop. by the time he arrives “Carnavoyeur”one of the simple advances, resignation faces frustration and with a poetic spirit full of guitars and twin voices, gives way to the less firm step of the plate, the fast and not very new “What The Peephole Say”.
But the tide turns again and Homme lashes out with “Sicily”, a composition of the viscose family “Keep Your Eyes Peeled”which dispenses a crush to enjoy with narrowed eyes and nerves on the surface of the skin “Look into my eyes, I come to delight myself.
The final stretch is marked by two extremes. The easiest cut “Emotion Sickness”, represents a long-awaited moment of respite. The prevailing tension gives some space to pleasant harmony and a hooky riff that could have been composed by Jack White. In the other corner and last position of the tracklist appears “Straight Jacket Fitting”, misty journey into the unknown again on board that dying locomotive, about to run out of coal. From dark blues to passages of almost operatic grandiloquence, and again that Bowie-like spirit emerges in Homme’s voice (the voices), in this case infused with some kind of stupefying potion. In the last intentions of the song, before its acoustic outro, which finally delivers some peace, the cathartic flight to which this album exposed its creator is noticeable. Above all, when the letters express “I am so sick of this place. Let the cure come Come and heal me. Now. Good dogs lie down.”
We want Homme to find that long-awaited cure. Yes, but he worries us that this antidote will inhibit him from continuing to release excellent records over and over again.