Hear Me Out: ‘…Like Clockwork’ is still Queens of the Stone Age’s best release
Josh Homme was dead, to begin with. In 2011, the Queens of the Stone Age frontman died on the table during what he claimed at the time was a routine surgery on his knee.
Reflecting on that terrifying moment, Homme told The Guardian, “I woke up, and there was a doctor going, ‘Shit, we lost you.’” The knee surgery story was a cover-up for a much darker truth. The procedure was related to a bout with MRSA he’d contracted from going “in too deep” with drugs.
Homme was left bedridden for four months, practically unable to walk, while also going sober for the first time in years. No wonder the experience left him in a deep depression he felt unable to overcome. The first course of action, like so many before him, was to get the band together. His state had left him barely able to write songs, though, so rather than get in the studio, Homme decided to tour the band’s swaggering 1998 self-titled debut album in full.
The tour was a triumph both for the performances and for Homme personally. It was a chance to get into smaller venues than the band were used to at the time and play for the sake of playing. Kick out some raucous, classic jams, and reconnect with a more simple vision of the monolith Queens of the Stone Age had become.
Fittingly, it would also become that version of the band’s last hurrah. As soon as the tour ended, Homme decided to take the demos he’d been making on the road into the studio. He realised that the way the band had worked previously, with him as the sole creative force building and rebuilding the band every time for each record, wasn’t going to work anymore.
In an interview with The Skinny, he put it thus: “I had to ask them ‘if you want to make a record with me right now, in the state I’m in, come into the fog. It’s the only chance you got.’” Not everyone in Homme’s vicinity was entirely down for this, either. Longtime drummer Joey Castillo called it quits halfway through the recording of the album.
Fortunately, Homme was able to find a decent replacement in the form of a mate of his, some unknown session player called Dave Grohl. The Foos main man wasn’t alone either. A truly stacked supporting cast assembled for the record, including Mark Lanegan, Trent Reznor, Alex Turner and the actual Elton John. It would have to be one hell of a record to live up to it, and fortunately, that’s exactly what they got.
The record became 2013s …Like Clockwork and I’ll level with you, dear reader, I’m only a fairweather Queens fan. To me, they’re a singles band. One day, they’ll have an absolutely flawless greatest hits collection, but nearly all their albums run out of steam fairly quickly… apart from this one. …Like Clockwork is one of my favourite albums of all time, and it was one pretty much immediately after I heard it.
To me, Queens records can feel like cosplay, less a work of songwriting and production and more a mood board for what a cool rock song sounds like in the 21st century. Don’t get me wrong, it works. No band who created ‘Little Sister’, ‘3s and 7s’, ‘Feelgood Hit of the Summer’ and ‘No One Knows’ is doing something wrong per se, but for the first time, Homme sounds like he’s writing from his heart and not his hips.
That begins right from the off. Queens albums normally begin with a bang, but ‘Keep Your Eyes Peeled’ is, to me, one of the most compelling points on the whole record. This is a record that doesn’t burst into life but descends like a winter’s night. Suddenly, uncomfortably dark when last that you checked, it was still the afternoon. Homme’s guitar chug comes in, and his falsetto soon after. His knack for a darkly beautiful melody finds a perfect home over this atmospheric gloom.
In comparison, previous Queens albums are white-knuckle rides because you’re holding on for dear life. This feels more like clutching your armrest when you think you see something moving in the background of a Mike Flanagan movie. It’s astonishing, and while the rest of the album does move with the QOTSA swagger of old, it’s never too far away from disappearing back into the fog that Homme talked about earlier.
Those old-school thrills are also some of the album’s high points. Lead single ‘My God Is The Sun’ shreds something fierce, as does the Mark Lanegan co-write ‘Fairweather Friends’ and the finale of ‘Kalopsia.’ ‘Smooth Sailing’ sees Homme joyously throwing himself into old habits for a breath of fresh air. Talking magnificent bollocks like “I got bruises and hickeys / Stitches and Scars / Got my own theme music plays wherever I are” over a riff that might just have been cut from Bowie’s Young Americans for being too trouser-splittingly horny.
However, after detours back into the dark places on ‘The Vampyre of Time And Memory’, the album throws you back there full force with its absolutely knockout closing one-two punch of ‘I Appear Missing’ and the title track. The former shows how to build from the album’s quietest point to its most ferocious in one fell swoop, and the latter a piano ballad showing just how defeated Homme feels behind all the bravado, ending the album on the disquieting line “One thing that is clear, it’s all downhill from here”.
Happily, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The album was released to universal acclaim and secured the band’s first number one album on the Billboard 200. It was the album that raised Queens from a huge cult outfit to a huge band, able to sell out basically any arena in the world and headline any festival in front of them. Most of all, though, it made a genuine band out of what was previously a project made up of Josh Homme and friends.
The lineup Homme built to tour the record has gone on to be the band’s first solidified lineup and has continued that way in the decade since. By welcoming others “into the fog”, Homme didn’t just find a way out. He gave a blueprint for how to navigate it for others. By not denying the darkness or covering it up with false bravado, he channelled it into something powerful enough to shine through the fog. That, to me, is why …Like Clockwork is by far and away the best Queens of the Stone Age album and one of the best rock albums of that decade.
