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Live Review
by SashaS
26-6-2002
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More on: Queens Of The Stone Age
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| Nick QotSA with a little bit more on |
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Live: Queens Of The Stone Age
Mean Fiddler, London
Tuesday, June 25, 2002
Queens Of The Stone Age are THE supergroup, officially!
Feelgood music doesn’t come any better and that becomes clear with the opening chords by the Queens Of The Stone Age who stopped by on their way to the Glasto Festi. The band takes to the bare, bar instruments, stage and delivers a set that would make angels salivate and gladden a day of hell-dwellers. And now, they are officially a supergroup, with Dave Grohl on drums and occasional vocal duty by Mark Lanegan (ex-Screaming Trees).
But, there is none of the ego-battling onstage, this all has one function – to create and present live music as a powerhouse entity. Former stalwarts of Kyuss, Josh Homme (guitar) and Nick Oliveri (bass) lead this combo into a sonic land where magic resides… It is a mesmerising display of riffs, huge rhythms, melodies that flirt with pop element but firmly remain on the rocking side.
Within the whole world of stoner-scope they taste and engage all genres, toying with them but never really getting in bed with any lot. This is truly hybrid music and not that one-dimensional rubbish Linkin Park managed to smuggle in as something worthwhile. QotSA’s modus is ‘born solo’ music, an individualist take on what is, or should be. Adventurous rock that shapes time slots… And, in this club, it took only the second song, the anthem to warped-living – ‘Feel Good Hit Of The Summer’, to make everyone look like they just stepped out of a shower!
It was that hot, in and out, in-between, generating more energy by not being able to resist moving to the beat, losing one’s perspective in a heady mix of tunes’n’smells (weed, mostly), switching off reality as a bothersome and pestering programme… Oh, rock, how sweet you can be! Ever so rarely! Songs from new album, ‘Songs For The Deaf’, come thick and fast, all big-riffed, more grandiose, taking you further into the inner-spaceness, song-breaks sounding more poignant, chord-ambient enlarged to cut deeper in exploring the joy of living and jiving. It is all too obvious that this band operates from a parallel stage of existence.
Right, all you want to know is whether Grohl has made this band bigger, better? Well, his first London appearance behind a kit since 1993 (with Nirvana), left no-one in doubt of his drum-skills: Grohl hits big, he crosses fast, combines emotion and power with ease making QotSA sounding more solid but then… The identity of the band remains with Homme and Oliveri and as long as they are there this will be the QotSA we know and love for what they do and the way they do it. They let it alter for three songs when Lanegan takes over the vocal from the two founders and it all becomes a tad restrained, almost more Gothic.
The story is that Kurt Cobain, the drummer’s Nirvana colleague, always wanted to be a member of Mudhoney and this could be Grohl’s equivalent.
SashaS
26-6-2002
Queens Of The Stone Age’s album ‘Songs For The Deaf’ is released 26 August 2002 on Universal
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