'In Times New Roman...' by Queens of the Stone Age
Is there such a thing as bitter swagger? Resigned swagger? Spiteful swagger? Apparently, they exist, because Joshua Homme and Queens of the Stone Age express them intently on the band’s eighth album, In Times New Roman…
“I realize you’re like a bummed cigarette,” Homme half-whispers, half-moans in “Time & Place,” and his tone is almost tender, even as he elaborates: “Suicide in slow motion.” A lot has happened to him and to the world since QOTSA’s last album, Villains, came out in 2017, and he’s sharp enough not to try to address all of it.
Fortunately, his band’s default settings are Rawk Harder and Rawk Smarter, and those settings are locked in for songs like “What the Peephole Say,” in which the band gets Gothic while racing toward a Bad Religion tempo; “Paper Machete,” which could pass for a Hives song in the loudest and leanest ways; and “Made to Parade,” a Tom Waits-ian stroll down an Abbey Road littered with grimness and gaiety.
The rest of the Queens (guitarists Dean Fertita and Troy Van Leeuwen, bassist Michael Shuman, and drummer Jon Theodore) are obviously crucial to smarter, harder rocking, and they stay in the groove or jump out of it, as required and with playful precision.
Without that playfulness, some of the darker moments—the sudden drop into foreboding, maudlin strings in the midst of the Stooges-echoing “Obscenery,” the rough Bon Scott-period AC/DC riffs within the ELO catchiness of “Emotion Sickness”—could occlude the wryness this band has long made an irony central to its power. (Check those song titles for further proof.)
The wryness might be heard as magicianly misdirection away from painful revelations or as avoidance of the earnest, but on In Times New Roman… Queens of the Stone Age won’t and can’t hide the pomp and stomp. That’s swagger informed by experience, in the Oscar Wilde sense of the word.
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