“I don’t think that I will”: the album Josh Homme said he could never make again
There’s been plenty of mascots and animated logos throughout rock ‘n’ roll, from Iron Maiden’s ghoulish Eddie to Motörhead’s snaggletooth insignia—but Queens of the Stone Age‘s Era Vulgaris may well be popular music’s first album to boast its own marketing character.
Taking influence from the old Fred Flintstone commercials hawking Winston cigarettes, a whole host of bruised and broken cartoon friends populated Era Vulgaris‘ liner notes, with ‘Bulby’ at the centre of the gang, representing, according to frontman Josh Homme, “…what you perceive to be a great idea that really is not that great of an idea”.
Eureka ideas that turn out otherwise is a sentiment that plagued the album’s recording. It had the band boldly entering a Los Angeles studio without a single song written and seeing what can naturally be conjured, Desert Sessions style—Homme’s improvisational side-project featuring an ever-rotating roster of members. A lack of game plan resulted in recording sessions lasting from July 2006 to April 2007, with rhythm guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen stating that he spent ten months solely focused on the Queens’ fifth LP.
Following 2005’s Lullabies to Paralyse‘s coven smog of sludge and black magic swagger, Era Vulgaris opted for a chunky punch of garage rock tautly lacquered with an electronic coating. Lead by the crunchy ‘Sick, Sick, Sick’ and featuring the horny pop number ‘Make It wit Chu‘, the album propels with fixed energy and razor-sharp songcraft considering the lack of a game plan. It was still smattered with detours into hushed vocal harmonies or spooky guitar noodles when the moment called for it.
“I love this album, but I will never make another album this way again,” Homme told Uncut in 2013. “Or at least I don’t think that I will. My goal is to make better and better albums that don’t suck and I don’t really care what I have to do to do it. In a perfect world, the idea is for each of the records to make you a better person. To be able to understand the life you lead more. The rest will just take care of itself.”
In many ways, Era Vulgaris marked the last time Queens truly wielded their old rock ‘n’ roll magic. Entering a hard rock climate dominated by nu-metal in the late 1990s, the superstardom that followed 2000’s Rated R and 2002’s Song for the Deaf landed like authentic wormholes to everything exciting and alluring about classic rock in stark contrast to what Kerrang! TV had on offer.
Then, subsequent albums began to whiff of formula ‘rawk’ and believing your own hype, kicking female photographers in the face while lost in his own self-indulgent rockstar lore, which meant extricating the violent bullshit from future output.
The spark had died. The spirit of rock ‘n’ roll is a beautiful thing and it need not lapse into cartoon self-parody. This is something Homme knew all too well, and it’s what shaped his early work up to Era Vulgaris with an earnest and sincere veneration of what made the guitar exciting in the first place. Yet, their fifth effort stands as a pivot, signalling a band that would never roll quite as well again and the loss of whatever rock talisman Homme kept in his pocket that made them so exciting in the first place.
