The one album Josh Homme will never get tired of: “Sounds as good now as it did then”
Every artist can find themselves in a holding pattern whenever they play some of their classics live. It’s no surprise that a band like Radiohead don’t like the idea of playing ‘Creep’, and no matter how many times he claims to be Mr Positivity, Paul McCartney may find himself going through the motions now and again whenever he plays the first notes of ‘Let It Be’ or ‘Hey Jude’. Since Queens of the Stone Age never got that same kind of adulation in the past, though, Josh Homme has the same reaction to their debut album as he did back in the late 1990s.
When Homme was first putting together Queens of the Stone Age from the ashes of Kyuss, though, he wasn’t exactly looking for the steady stoner rockers that we know them as today. There were still a lot of great songs to come out of that era of rock and roll, but Homme just wanted a chance to experiment with different textures while using a round-robin of different musicians behind him.
Even when ‘Regular John’ and ‘If Only’ had potential as hits, it wasn’t like they were intended to be mainstream rock records. It was just the sound of a couple of musicians having when they went into the studio, and for as foreboding as some of the tracks are, you can still hear the people inside just trying to screw around and see what comes out of it.
While the album had a sturdy enough foundation to make a classic like Rated R one year later, part of the reason it works so well is how much is left over from Kyuss. Looking at a track like ‘Walkin’ On the Sidewalks’, that hypnotic groove feels like it’s leftover from the outro of a tune like ‘Demon Cleaner’ where they just hold on to those long notes for however long they want to.
If anything, this album is the closest that Homme ever came to creating what he used to call ‘robot rock’ when describing the group’s sound. Era Vulgaris may have been their deliberate attempt to make things almost clinically robotic, but the guttural sound of these riffs sounds like machines rather than human hands are working them out.
Despite being miles away from the record by the 2010s, Homme still knew that there was a certain sound on that record that couldn’t be replicated, telling Decibel, “I think that record sounds as good now as it did then. There is a personality on that record. I think it needs to be discovered by people; a lot of people thought that Rated R was our debut because even when it was out it was hard to get. I mean, I am re-discovering it, thinking, ‘Wow, I really like this thing!”
Considering how long Homme had distanced himself from that album, it was enough for him to feel inspired going into the recording of …Like Clockwork. That record is still among the best that Homme ever made, but despite it boasting some great modern production, a tune like ‘If I Had a Tail’ and especially ‘I Sat By the Ocean’ wouldn’t feel all that out of place next to ‘You Can’t Quit Me Baby’, either.
Every band is playing with fire when they start getting nostalgic about their older material, but that’s not always a bad thing. Some people just try to regurgitate what they already know, but given how many avenues Homme went down, the debut is a good way for him to remember just where he came from.
