It’s my birthday, so this recommendation is a present to myself.
I have loved Foo Fighters for most of my life. Queens of the Stone Age sit just as close to my heart, and I will follow Josh Homme or Dave Grohl into almost anything they decide to make. Put them in a room with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones and Alain Johannes and immediate love feels inevitable.
But Them Crooked Vultures is more than the inevitable result of an impossible lineup.
Supergroups often sound exactly like that word suggests: famous musicians placed beside one another, each waiting for their turn to be recognised. This album sounds like a band. You can hear where everyone came from, but when they play together, they create a fourth identity far less predictable than a simple combination of Queens of the Stone Age, Foo Fighters and Led Zeppelin.
“Bandoliers” might be the best way in. The riffs catch immediately, the chorus arrives exactly when you need it and it is also the track I use whenever I try a new pair of headphones. Solid reasons, I know.
From there, the album refuses to behave.
“Nobody Loves Me & Neither Do I” introduces Josh Homme at his most theatrical: dangerous, funny, sleazy and almost burlesque. That unpredictability runs through the entire record. John Paul Jones finds another path through the bassline. Dave Grohl goes completely fucking nuts. By the time “Spinning in Daffodils” changes shape, the surprise is not that the band has taken another turn, it is that they can still find somewhere new to go.
Some critics heard an album in need of an editor. At 13 songs and over an hour long, with several tracks stretching towards seven or eight minutes, it was called overstuffed, self-indulgent and too willing to let brilliant musicians keep playing.
Yeah well, no. They’re wrong.
This album should not lose a minute. Its detours are the point. These are not three musicians carefully protecting their reputations; they sound like friends testing one another, laughing when somebody pushes the song too far and then following them anyway.
There are no skips here. None. But it’s also one my top three favorite albums all time. So, biased?
Them Crooked Vultures is what happens when people with nothing left to prove still want to surprise one another.
And it has some fucking riffs that might change your life.
Listen where you listen:
