Heavy type
Josh Homme releases the tension of five troubled years in an electrifying robo-funk barrage. By Andrew Perry.
Queens Of The Stone Age
★★★★
In Times New Roman…
MATADOR. CD/DL/LP
JOSH HOMME has shouldered a mountain of woe since August 2017, when his last QOTSA record, Villains, appeared: widely condemned for hospitalising a female photographer; divorced and dragged into a custody battle over his children; bereaved after losing friends Mark Lanegan and Taylor Hawkins.
Following Villains, this most flamboyant and articulate of post-millennial rock stars has been off-road for five years, maintaining a discreet public silence. At this point, he might be forgiven for erupting into formless Janovian primal therapy: In Times New Roman… instead favours a precision-tuned explosion of riffage, melody and groove, whose furious energy is quite overwhelming on first listen. Throughout, you feel Homme’s pain, but ultimately marvel at his ability to channel it into music so brutally uplifting.
Where early Queens albums, to be fair, carried some chaff, Team Josh, now a steady quintet after the turbulence around 2013’s …
Like Clockwork, conjures a complex, swaggering sound with nar y a wasteful millisecond of flab.
In places here (Negative Space; Emotion Sickness), the quintet evolve away from the mutant disco of the previous decade’s bangers If I Had A Tail and Feet Don’t Fail Me, towards a robotic punk-funk, reflecting lyrical themes of coldness, desensitisation and inhumanity. Homme perhaps picked up such crunching, mechanical strategies while touring as Iggy Pop’s band leader in 2016, busting out Mass Production from The Idiot every night.
Without naming names, a couple of songs clearly tackle his post-marital horror: see Paper Machete’s withering summation: “You speak lioness and damsel-in-distress so fluently – does your every single relation end in pain and miser y?”, as well as Negative Space’s vulnerable confession, “Oh betrayal, it tears me up inside/I’m just a fool who is terrified.” Obscenery, Carnavoyeur, and the Tin Machine-like clanking What The Peephole Say, meanwhile, vent the rage and paranoia arising from your personal affairs turning into a tabloid circus (hence the album title’s scathing reference to the newsprint font).
The triumph of In Times New Roman… lies in its refusal to perpetuate gutter-level counter-argument. It’s more Jack White’s allusive Blunderbuss, less Marvin Gaye’s graphic Here, My Dear. Even amid the tensile pummelling, there’s irrepressible joy in Homme’s verbal playfulness (note the gonzo glee in those three titles above!), in moments of sublime release, such as Made To Parade’s glam rock strut, and in how Emotion Sickness’s stuttering verses glide into the soft-rock jubilation of its none-morebittersweet “baby don’t care for me” refrain.
In a swirling Terry Gilliam finale, nineminute Strait Jacket Fitting finally turns the automaton jackboot stomp into a romp, as Homme realises, “To face down your demons, you’ve gotta free them… Oh, I insist on daydreaming”, and ultimately concludes, “bring on the healing”. The coda duly plays out like a Led Zeppelin Bron-Yr-Aur acoustic idyll – hard-won optimism, indeed.