The one band Slash said never made a bad album: “All their records are great”
It doesn’t take a lot of work to make any Slash solo sound great.
As much as he likes to fly off the handle every single time he plays live, a lot of his best solos are reminiscent of Jimmy Page’s best solos, to the point where every Guns N’ Roses song would have sounded wrong if there was any other guitar part used. But while Slash felt that there were more than a few times where things got in the way of him making the best song he could, he had to tip his hat to those that have never struck out whenever they went into the studio.
Because if there was one thing that Slash knew about the last iteration of Guns, it was that too many cooks in the kitchen were never going to work on any of their albums. Use Your Illusion already caused one of the biggest strains of the band’s relationship with Axl Rose and even though there were plenty more reasons for them to make more records going forward, Slash wasn’t going to sit and watch as Rose quickly took over every single piece of the band as he went along.
The guitar god needed another outlet, and when looking at Slash’s Snakepit, he did at least have a lot more riffs in his arsenal than anyone else in the group. He was making the music that the follow-up to Appetite for Destruction was supposed to be, but there were already new and interesting bands coming out of the woodwork in the late 1990s. The nu-metal scene didn’t exactly appeal to Slash, but Queens of the Stone Age were doing something different that he hadn’t heard before.
Josh Homme had already started working out what his band was going to be when he started to leave Kyuss behind, but when you look through every one of their records, there was never a point where they could be pinned down too terribly often. You can put most of their songs under the banner of stoner rock, but even all the way up to their more recent albums, Slash felt that there weren’t any flaws on their records.
Homme was far from the same guitar god that Slash was, but there was no doubt that he had the same swagger that the guitarist was always looking for, saying, “Queens is one of my all-time favourite bands and I don’t know why they’re not bigger than they are. They’re fantastic. I mean, they write amazing music and they’re an amazing live band. All their records are great, but it is very avant-garde.”
But the greatest strength that Queens has is their refusal to rest on their laurels. Homme would get bored if he stayed in any one direction for very long, and while there were more than a few rock fans that would have called him absolutely crazy to work with someone like Mark Ronson on an album like Villains, the fact that they came out with a song as catchy as ‘The Way You Used To Do’ is still mind-boggling because of how well it fits with their usual heavy aesthetic.
And despite being cut from a completely different cloth, slash was looking to infuse a bit of what Queens was doing into his own music as well. He had to compromise more than a few times when he was in Guns or even Velvet Revolver, but when he made his first official solo record in 2010, one of the first people that he wanted to work with was producer Eric Valentine because of how good Songs for the Deaf sounded whenever he heard it.
So for an era where Slash’s brand of rock and roll might be looked at more as a novelty, the fact that Queens are still making some of the most consistent records of any band of their ilk makes them one of the rarest breeds of their generation. But if you think about it, it makes total sense since Homme was never remotely interested in being a typical rock and roll artist in the first place.
