Queens of the Stone Age (QOTSA) came stomping and romping into the post-grunge atmosphere of the late ‘90s, with the tall and cryptic front man Josh Homme in charge, and a tailor-made sound in which influences of Cream, hard rock of old, and residual grunge grit could be heard. They hit hitsville on the rock radio front in 2002 upon release of their album Songs for the Deaf, with mock-mondo rockers “Go with the Flow” and “No One Knows.” Not surprisingly, those songs functioned as anthemic tent poles for their rocking fine concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl last week.
Opening act Bully, a nice and noisy four-piece built around the dynamo singer Alicia Bognanno, greased the genre wheels for a show in which polish duked it out with chaotic catharsis, for art’s sake.
Not enough is made of Homme’s ironic/comedic attitude, starting with the absurdist band name. They are heavy, but also satirize heaviness and refuse to take the rock circus too seriously. And then there are the shameless wordplay and cultural backflips in their songbook, going back to the vice name-checking lyric of their early classic “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” (which they did not play at the Bowl). Much more recently, they had me at the font-based title of last year’s album In Times New Roman…, and the punchy songs “Obscenery,” “Paper Machete,” and “Emotion Sickness,” the latter two of which did play here.
Los Angelenos have been heading up the coast to partake of concert action in our humble town more and more, but this seemed like a particular L.A.-infiltrated audience, a point not lost on Homme. “Hello, Santa Barbara,” he bellowed in standard-practice rock front man style, “but I know most of you are not from here. There is this one guy up front who is a Santa Barbaran. We’ll call him Dale.”
QOTSA’s Bowl show bristled with the kind of immediacy the band can muster up, while also serving as a survey of the band’s career story thus far. The bold strokes of the latest album, In Times New Roman… validates the band’s continuing creative fire, after a long break following 2017’s lesser project Villains. They’re back, with a vengeance and an attitude.
But humanity and personal touches enter into the large picture, as well, as with the 2013 album …Like Clockwork, made after a health crisis knocked Homme out of commission and nearly ended his musical life. The Bowl’s setlist included five tracks from that critical comeback album, including the hypnotic “I Sat by the Ocean,” with its snaky-cool guitar parts and Homme’s trademark falsetto flights. And yes, it’s an example of their Cream-y inklings.
In another Cream-themed reference, on the tune “Make it wit Chu,” from their 2007 album Era Vulgaris, time stretched out and drummer Jon Theodore cut loose with a lanky powerhouse drum solo. Crowd singalong tactics were also in the works.
The summary verdict of their Bowl conquest: from the deep cut choice of “Little Sister” as an opening and the orgasmic visceral power and light-show-ratatat of the closing “A Song for the Dead,” the twentysomething QOTSA more than proved its vitality and relevance as a whatever-you-wanna-call-it rock band on the scene.
