101. Queens of the Stone Age - Lullabies to Paralyze

There's not much I can do with QOTSA albums except review them like normal.It's very hard to write about a band you love so much because all you want to do is gush about the songs and force people to listen to them. There's no big stories to go with these albums either, because they are a constant soundtrack. Not a day goes by when I don't listen to at least one QOTSA album in full.

This album has it all. It's part wicked fairytale, part deluded romanticism. LTP opens with Mark Lanegan and the creepy, yet mesmerizing This Lullaby and careens through a slew of musical styles until it ends with Josh Homme's melancholy voice on Long, Slow Goodbye. In between you have Everybody Knows That You're Insane, a bluesy piece that invokes a smoky barroom. There's the ominous sounding Burn the Witch which features Billy Gibbons playing some killer riffs (and also includes Jack Black hand claps). The pop-perfect In My Head is everything that was awesome about 70s radio hits. There's the wistful, almost mournful I Never Came and the deep and dark Someone's in the Wolf, which makes me think of being lost in the woods in some warped bedtime story. The Blood is Love is all spacey, like something you should listen to with a bong and a black light in someone's basement, as is the groovy You've Got a Killer Scene There Man. The awesome Broken Box is vulgar spitefulness set to a danceable, ass-shaking, hand clapping beat. Then Long, Slow Goodbye, haunting song in which Homme does an amazing job of conveying the sadness within.

I could say this is my favorite QOTSA album, but that would be true for only today. It varies, depending on my mood.

Favorite song: Broken Box (today)
The Fade

17. Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris

(Side note: you will find that the QOTSA reviews will tend to be longer than most and more like actual reviews, simply because they are my favorite band and I tend to get carried away when discussing their albums)

There's always trepidation when your favorite band puts out a new album. All the anticipation you've built up makes you almost not want to listen to the album when you finally get it in your hands. Or maybe that's just me. I just hate being disappointed by bands I love. So when I sat down to listen to Era Vulgaris for the first time, I remembered how I felt upon first hearing the previous album, Lullabies to Paralyze. I hated it. It was missing the decadence of Nick Oliveri. But, I grew to love it eventually. I guess it's like having an ugly baby. At first you're horrified, then you learn to find the beauty within it.

At first I was ambivalent about Era. I didn't know if I liked it, hated it, loved it. I put it away after the first listen and let it soak in. Then I put it in the car and listened to it over and over again while we drove around Long Island one weekend on a photo taking/authentic Mexican food finding spree. There were songs that I kept repeating: Suture up Your Future, 3's & 7's, Into the Hollow. And I loved the rendition of Make it Wit Chu, a song previously heard on Desert Sessions. More importantly, there were no songs I skipped.

Each QOTSA album is completely different from the others. I know that sounds like a "no shit" statement, but with a lot of bands, you get the same sound, different lyrics on their albums. With QOTSA, each new effort is like discovering a new genre within one band, or a new band within that band (which sort of holds true as the lineup for this band changes so often, and there are so many guests artists on each album).

Era Vulgaris is deeper musically than any of the previous titles. While lyrically it's not as tight as some of the earlier work, there's a lot of introspection here and enough thoughtfulness to keep the words as interesting as the music. The music itself is full, broad and encompasses so many different styles that it's hard to get sick of this album; even after a hundred repeated plays over a two day period, I was still hearing things in songs I didn't hear previously.

It's not my favorite album of theirs, but it is a great album.

Favorite song: Suture up Your Future (live, acoustic version)
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