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Queens Of The Stone AgeLullabies To Paralyze Interscope/UMG The answer to your first question is no, Queens of the Stone Age don't sound all that different on their first album without co-founder Nick Oliveri. The answer to your second is yes, in his absence those frenetic two-minute punk bursts that peppered past albums are nowhere to be found. The third answer is also yes; this is the most cohesive record of the band's career. Now here's one for you: How is it that Queens of the Stone Age are universally hailed as one of the world's greatest rock bands without having ever released a consistently great record? That's not a criticism, merely fact. Each Queens album contains moments of genuine greatness interspersed with passages that allow attention to wander. They habitually release the album you expect them to, rather than the one you hope they will. 'Lullabies To Paralyze' does nothing to change this. It opens superbly with Mark Lanegan gently crooning his way through the sea shanty-esque This Lullaby before the machine cranks up. The cohesiveness is largely due to a loose theme running through the album suggesting some demented fairy tale - song titles include Burn The Witch, Someone's In The Wolf and The Blood Is Love - but this is no concept album. As predicted here, In Your Head is the only track from the last Desert Sessions LP to graduate to full Queen-ness and with first single Little Sister forms the record's 'accessible' core, prior to the ...Wolf and ...Blood... double, both tracks run for around seven minutes. Highlights include the choppy Everybody Knows That You Are Insane, the slinky "You Got A Killer Scene There, Man..." and the very cool, tango-infused Like A Drug. Why it's been tacked on as a bonus track is mind-boggling since it adds a texture that's missing in the album proper and rounds things out perfectly. Josh Homme has done it again - another imperfect record that only enhances his band's reputation. But that band is Queens Of The Stone Age, and it was ever thus.  |
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