Queens Of The Stone Age, Rough Trade East - music review

This baffling show in a shop was a 30-minute, seven-song warm-up for the band's second-on-the-bill appearance at the Download festival on Saturday
12/06 queens of the stone age. edition alternative image LOS ANGELES, CA - MAY 23: Musician Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age performs at the Wiltern Theatre on May 23, 2013 in Los Angeles, California.
12 June 2013

Josh Homme is probably best-known for his stint in Dave Grohl’s supergroup, Them Crooked Vultures, and making a terrible hash of producing Humbug, the third Arctic Monkeys album. His day job, Queens of the Stone Age, are so revered that Elton John, Grohl, forgiving Arctic Monkey Alex Turner, Trent Reznor and Scissor Sister Jake Shears guested on their sixth and finest album, …Like Clockwork, which currently lies at number 2 in the British charts.

None of those illustrious helpers appeared at last night’s baffling show in a shop: a 30-minute, seven-song warm-up for their second-on-the-bill appearance at the Download festival on Saturday. Tall, clean-cut and looking for all the world like a defrocked line dancer, Homme himself was a barrel of contradictions, exuding the courtliness of a Southern gentleman even as he announced: “I just want to fuck and get high.” And for all the Californian’s cheery “goddammit, how the fuck are you?” inclusivity, Homme and his cocksure henchmen turned up 25 minutes late and spurned lusty demands for an encore.

Too flibbertigibbet and too willing to stray from the rock template to appeal to their fellow Americans, theirs is music to wallow in. So they cruised through a succession of styles from Burn the Witch’s glam thump to the faux funk of Smooth Sailing, which recalled Emotional Rescue-era Rolling Stones. The poppy Go With the Flow was how One Direction might sound if they embraced grunge, but I Appear Missing’s coruscating finale showed that, in the right hands, an instrumental wig-out can be more thrilling than indulgent. Then, just as they seemed ready to take flight, they were gone, without explanation, never to return.

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