Music

Writer Cyril Connolly once famously claimed that, ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway’, but parenthood clearly hasn’t sapped Josh Homme’s creative strength one bit. For their fifth album, the singer-songwriter/guitarist with Queens Of The Stone Age has engineered more subtle modifications to their dirty, desert-ravaged boogie metal, proving yet again that it’s possible to play power chords without being either pompous or prosaic and to rock like a mutha without fronting like a bunch of macho morons.

Their femininity has always set QOTSA apart from the meat-and-potatoes, modified-metal pack. It stretches past the moniker (how dully obvious would it have been, had they opted for Kings OTSA?) and its neat juxtaposition with their singer’s own manly surname, past the liberal use of falsetto (a metal staple, after all) to their declared aim of making people swivel their hips, rather than just bang their heads.

‘Era Vulgaris’ thus boasts plenty of louche grooves alongside its gritty, taut-buttocked riffs. ‘Turning On The Screw’ opens, morphing the band’s trademark clipped riffing into a sexy, glam stomp that suggests ZZ Top playing ‘We Will Rock You’ in a smithy. Then it’s into the brutally staccato ‘Sick, Sick, Sick’ (with guest vocalist Julian Casablancas), which outdoes even DFA 1979 for disco-metal fury, and on through a lean ’n’ lowering ‘Into The Hollow’. Filthy prime cut ‘Misfit Love’ riffs itself into sweet oblivion via an orgasmic slow build, with the Kyuss-like killer ‘Battery Acid’ as a chaser. Hot on its heels comes ‘3’s & 7’s’, which sounds like three songs in one but packs a surprisingly poppy punch and sets the scene for the sun-kissed exercise in stoner-boogie seduction that is ‘Make It Wit Chu’, and a moodily poignant ‘Suture Up Your Future’; the title track, which features Trent Reznor, providing the hammering and malevolent full stop.All conclusive proof that if you’re of a mind to be both royally rocked and rolled, the Queens will see you right.