The genre Josh Homme couldn’t stand: “No offence”
Between the many projects that Josh Homme has been involved in over the course of his career, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has found himself covering a significant amount of musical ground.
Most people would tend to agree that his most notable and culturally significant work is with Queens of the Stone Age, a band he has corralled for 30 years and managed to reshape on plenty of occasions. In this band alone, desert rock, blues and hard-hitting riffs tend to be the driving force behind his compositions, but that also doesn’t mean that Homme is completely averse to laying down something highly melodic and pop-inspired.
Not only this, but the band are noted for often applying complex structures to their work, something that they’ve evidently borrowed from the realm of progressive rock. In total contrast, this is almost the inverse of how one might see his work with Eagles of Death Metal, a rather ironically-named band rooted in an adoration of garage rock and with neither any affinity for death metal nor the work of Don Henley and co.
Then you’ve got Them Crooked Vultures, a one-off project that was far from being a routine venture into classic rock territory, along with the help of John Paul Jones and Dave Grohl. While there weren’t too many different elements coming together when compared to what Queens of the Stone Age had already done, fusing that with the background of the veteran Jones and his experience in Led Zeppelin, it was still a showcase of incredible musical aptitude and versatility.
But Kyuss, his earliest band of note, is perhaps the most intriguing part of the puzzle, because it not only sees him making some of the heaviest music of his career, but it also firmly outlines where the boundaries of his remit are.
You can call Kyuss a lot of things, but apparently, metal isn’t one of the genres that Homme feels comfortable with the label of, particularly given that growing up, he claimed to never have really been influenced by the genre despite how closely aligned some of his output appears to have been.
“I’m not a metal guy at all,” Homme proclaimed in a 2014 interview. “I was raised on Black Flag. I never thought of myself as a metal guy. I never felt like I was in a metal band. I like eerie and beautiful and sex to all be combined, which I guess would be an Enya record.”
On top of this revelation, which was more of a rejection of Queens of the Stone Age being labelled as metal, he claimed that he’s always worked with one particular end result in mind. “Being a smooth operator has been the goal,” he noted. “I never really cared about playing to the guys because, y’know, who cares? I mean, no offence. When you’re a kid, you play heavy because you listen to Black Flag, and there ya go.”
It’s interesting to know that this is where he’s been coming from the entire time, and that despite showing plenty of signs of being an aficionado of metal, he’s never really found himself being particularly influenced by a sound he has so frequently adopted.
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