slowed down and magnified, is the riff, the persistent legacy of Mississippi blues. Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were the first to make a monolith of it; Soundgarden were its standard-bearers during the Nineties. Now, Queens of the Stone Age -- the resulting sludge from the drained oil pit of Kyuss -- are settling in as kings of the rock riff at the beginning of the new century.
Rated R is the latest depository of those crunching, low-guitar-string riffs. But it's not just that. It's a strange, category-evading rock record, a mystery disc of gravity and low humor, of punk aggression and love-bead contentment; when you try to nail down the band's personality, it won't stay still.
Perhaps that's because they're not really a band. When Kyuss broke up in 1995, Homme went on to play with Seattle's Screaming Trees before founding the Queens of the Stone Age with Kyuss bassist Nick Oliveri. Originally the band recorded and toured as a trio; now it has no solid lineup. Instead, for Rated R Homme and Oliveri wrote their songs in a Joshua Tree, California, bungalow, then went communal, using eight different drop-in studio guests, including Judas Priest's Rob Halford, Screaming Trees' Mark Lanegan and Earthlings' Pete Stahl. Amazingly, the record is not a mess at all -- one of these space cases is the high-functioning type.
On its debut album, Queens of the Stone Age, the band used repetition as a form of result-oriented, studied minimalism rather than as a perverse limitation -- unlike other stoner-rock bands, the riffs weren't the products of a "nobody's gonna tell me to stop playing this chord cycle" defiance. The record made a useful connection between American meat-and-potatoes macho rock of the early 1970s, like Blue Cheer and Grand Funk Railroad, and the precision-timing drones in German rock of the same period.
The second album improves on the strengths of the first, and it also shoots out into areas that you just wouldn't expect from guys who like to record the sound of bong hits. The music on Rated R is taut and episodic, always traveling somewhere, even when wallowing in full-spectrum multitrack technology, like the cross-fades between sighed vocal choruses, the vibraphone chords and the thick sprays of fuzzed guitar on "Better Living Through Chemistry." The band uses instrumentation -- electric piano, steel drums, vibraphones, steel guitar -- as texture to flesh out the music. These songs actually have arrangements; most stoner rock just settles on the floor in a puddle.
Homme is no lyricist. His most memorable lines on Rated R -- "You've got a monster in your parasol"; "You're
