Review Summary: Who are you, girl?
After the legendary stoner rock band Kyuss disbanded, guitarist Josh Homme started a new band with ex-drummer Alfredo Hernandez called Queens Of The Stone Age. It is a stoner rock band too, but with a different approach.
While every single stoner rock band sounded like Black Sabbath(and I'm not saying that in a bad way, I love this type of band), Queens have a more modern/mainstream sound (even if it's far from being radio friendly on this album). The band gained attention in the media after the 2002's album "Songs For The Deaf". While this album was their definitive masterpiece, they had some excellent albums before that, like "Rated R" and the Self-Titled album.
The Self-titled album still had some of the Kyuss sound for obvious reasons, but it was a step outside of the common stoner rock. 90% of the songs on the album are about catchy and raw riffs with psychedelic vocals and dirty bass lines that mix the traditional desert vibe of stoner rock with new modern hard rock tendencies, bringing new ideas to the genre.
The album follows a formula, songs like "Regular John" and "If Only" are hard songs that have simple riffs, lyrics and structures, but their charm lies exactly on that simplicity. The former starts with a guitar note repeating and a violin, and then it turns into one of the most catchy songs that Queens Of The Stone Age ever made, with a riff that is almost the same in the whole song, but it don't repeats to the point of become boring. The latter is a perfect hard rock song, and the most(probably the only) radio friendly on the album, with a happy riff that echoes in your head for a long time too. The song that shows the better application of this formula is "Mexicola", which is the real standout of the album, with a stunning bass line intro and a riff reminiscent of the Kyuss album "Welcome to Sky Valley", with lyrics about how we're all going to die. But there are some different songs in a slower tempo to give some variety, like "You Would Know" and "You Can't Quit Me Baby, and they work quite well too, even if they aren't standout tracks.
Josh Homme is a riff machine (Like I said before, almost every song on the album is a riff-based creature that pounds its masculinity in your face), but he's not only a fantastic guitarist, but an extremely talented vocalist too. His soft vocals gives a psychedelic feeling to the songs, and his falsettos get chills down to my spine everytime I listen. His lyrics are somewhat abstract, but they work. He plays the bass here too(under the Carlo Von Sexron name), and his bass lines can be loud and aggressive on songs like "Mexicola" and "Avon", or groovy like on "You Can't Quit Me Baby".
This album is a different monster on the Queens Of The Stone Age discography, it is their closest album to the Kyuss type of stoner rock, and it shows the great potential that QOTSA had. While the following albums were more experimental or had more variety, this album stands as one of their best.
Standout Tracks:
Regular John
Mexicola
If Only
Avon
