Though Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Josh Homme has been saddled with the burden of having reinvented stoner-rock for a new generation with his previous band, the ecstatically heavy Kyuss, that does a disservice to Homme’s virtues as a musician and songwriter.
The guitarist addressed his reputation head-on at the outset of Queens’ set Thursday at Metro: “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol,” went the chant, while Nick Oliveri’s bass and Gene Trautmann’s drums hammered out a staccato rhythm. “Coco-co-co-co-caine,” Homme stuttered, as though himself under the drug’s jittery influence, then unloaded a terse, four-bar flurry of notes that screamed to a halt with a long, lascivious sustain.
Even the way the sandy-haired singer inhaled before beginning each verse suggested some sort of unimaginable hedonism was about to begin. The opium den of possibilities was indeed open, and the Queens snaked, then strutted through the door, their riffs swinging from metallic meltdowns to a plush purr with fine-tuned impact.
Here was a heavy guitar band that relishes the touch of velvet, that argues that hard rock can be sensual, even sexy, without resorting to G-string cliches or leather-bondage costumes.
Homme sings in a high, blissed-out, almost feminine voice, floating above the thump of “The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret.”
Oliveri, with his Rasputin goatee, brought an element of anarchy to Homme’s surfer-dude calm, screaming with glee on the hardcore bubble-gum sendup “Quick and to the Pointless.” But the shaven-headed bassist was even more persuasive when he played against type, settling into the cushions of reverie on “Auto Pilot” while Homme’s guitar trembled and squealed in the margins between chord changes.
The core trio, abetted by a lap-steel guitarist, has only expanded its reach since its headlining shows of last year. Troutman brought a Latin feel to “Better Living Through Chemistry,” simulated a buffalo stampede on “How to Handle a Rope,” and chugged with the precision of a machine on “Regular John” and “Monsters in the Parasol” (think Kraftwerk crossed with Ween, topped with Homme’s diabolical guitar runs).
Many of the tracks from the group’s 1998 debut album, so brutally succinct in their studio incarnations, have realized their full potential on stage, particularly “Mexicola,” which dropped down to a spacy interlude that wouldn’t have sounded out of place amid the jazz-rock turbulence of Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew” album, and “You Can’t Quit Me Baby,” a big wave that crested to tsunamilike proportion before floating out to sea, only to pick up speed again toward an exhilarating finale.
The Queens’ versatility and power stood in contrast to the one-dimensional bombast of openers Vast.
Singer Jon Crosby tried to cross T. Rex’s glam crunch with Bauhaus’ gothic sensuality, but he was too busy playing some Andrew Lloyd Webber-like conception of a rock star to make the songs matter.
