Review Summary: Don’t expect anything like Rated R ever again, if you do you’ll be disappointed. If you just expect a good, if inconsistent hard rock album, have fun.
Joshua Homme is quickly become one of the most intriguing musical minds that we know of. He’s made albums like Rated R and Songs for the Deaf, which are essentially stoner rock masterpieces because of his and Nick Oliveri’s songwriting abilities and instrumental experimentation. With the loss of Nick Oliveri, however, things just haven’t been the same for Joshua Homme and his stoner rock project Queens of the Stone Age. Lullabies to Paralyze was an experimental effort, aiming more towards blues rock and such other genres, and seeing how fans responded to it, it was a failure. Era Vulgaris is essentially a rehash of the past, with a hint of more mainstream oriented structures to open up to a broader audience, and although far better than its predecessor, just seems a bit uninspired.
Era Vulgaris starts off a bit poorly, with two tracks that would be considered filler on any album, particularly “Sick Sick Sick”, which consists of repetitive, uninspired riffs and dull vocal patterns. “Turnin’ the Screw” is similar to “Sick Sick Sick” in the aspect that it’s uninspired and dull, but it’s uninspired and dull with benefits. “Turnin the Screw” has some fun lyrics and a danceable drum beat, but other than that, it’s just boring. However, the album starts to turn itself around with the incredibly straight forward “I’m Designer”. Admittedly, it’s not particularly innovative on the instrumental side, but the heavily distorted riffs that move in mechanical motions to fit the lyrical style of the song: it has a straight forward poltical nature. Not straight forward in the way Rage Against the Machines were, but more a comfortable midpoint between the now nonsensical ways of Serj Tankian’s ridiculous metaphors and Zach De La Rocha’s 2pac-like honesty and up-and-frontness, along with a scent of good ole’ humor.
As the album pushes along in this fashion, we start to realize what could be a pattern. The album is filled with what could be considered the goods, the bads, and the uglies. It’s incredibly inconsistent, with goods being absolutely awesome, like with“3s & 7s” has that heavy, pulsing riffing style that makes the song fresh and interesting throughout, along with two solos that are swift and to the point, ending and interlining the song perfectly. There is also the bads, being just plain mediocre, “Suture Your Future” being a perfect example of this, with the generic soft-loud nature of most ‘epic’ rock songs, though admittedly the song does have an interesting ambient introduction that leads into the mediocrity that is the rest of the song. Then of course, there is the ugly, and these songs just plain suck, like “Misfit Love”, which tries to be dirty and sleazy like a ZZ Top song, but just sounds too produced towards making a spacey atmosphere that it just ruins the song from being any fun.
On an overall front, this album is hard to place. The production is incredibly spacey, and better so, it at times hides the current decline and down fall of Joshua Homme’s ideas. However, it also doesn’t fit a lot of songs on the album. I already mentioned “Misfit Love” for this, but also “Into the Hallow”, which is bad enough as a ballad already, but the production placed on it just makes it ever enclosing, and at times it feels like this mesh of repeated ideas will never end. The spacey production work does work to help one song, and that is the epic closer “Run Pig Run”. Starting off slowly, it builds up to a boiling pot of impending doom with riffs scenting at fear and knifes being sharpened again and again. Tension builds up more and more as the song pushes along as Joshua Homme’s voice sounds more and more paranoid. You are being built up to an epic climax, and as the song slows down into a doomy and heavily distorted solo along with ghastly backing vocals creating the atmosphere of apocalypse, right before the song just falls in action and stops the same way it came in, with the sound of knifes being sharpened. This listener is now fully satisfied by Era Vulgaris’ epic ending.
Despite every little case against Era Vulgaris that is to be had, it’s still a good, hooky hard rock that shows signs of being more than that. But with this, you also realize that Homme will never reach the same level of songwriting like he had on Rated R ever again. At the same time; though, I really couldn’t care that much as long as what Homme is writing now is good, and since that is the case, it really doesn’t matter if he reaches songwriting levels of genius or not. Don’t expect anything like Rated R ever again, if you do you’ll be disappointed, but if you just expect a good, if inconsistent hard rock album, have fun.
