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BUY THE CD
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I am a very, very happy reviewer right now. I’ve just finished listening to
the
latest offering from one of the most exciting bands in music—Queens of
the Stone
Age—and I’m certainly not disappointed by the results. In
fact, it’s the best album
I’ve heard all year from any band in any genre of
music.
Lullabies
to Paralyze, the band’s follow-up to the smash success Songs for the
Deaf is a very creepy album. The music is as impressive as the score to any
Vincent Price horror movie, and it sounds as though it were composed by a mad genius—and,
to some extent, it was. Josh Homme and crew have the ability to control timing and
rhythm so well, while playing complex tunes that would drive any decent musician to
madness. The result is an exciting album of incredible music that still manages to
remain addictively listenable.
The thundering beats are off-set by ambient
waves of a kind of off-balanced,
frightful serenity, which lends depth to
compositions such as “Long Slow
Goodbye.” The carousel intro to “The Blood is Love”
is pure genius, while the
rest of the song is a maddening descent into controlled
chaos. “Little Sister,” the first single from the album, is certainly catchy, but it’s
the finale of the song that really gets the blood pumping. “Burn the Witch” and
“Someone’s in the Wolf” add an element of fairytale eeriness, a recurring theme of
lullabies, while “You Got a Killer Scene There, Man” seems to be made from the same
fabric as Frank Miller’s dark film noir Sin City. In
fact, each song on the album has its own unique quality, and I’ll spare you the details
of the rest in the hopes that you’ll decide to experience them all for
yourself.
The album also comes with a DVD—a nice bonus that details parts
of the
recording process, song by song. There’s also a hilarious interview with
Josh Homme—and I still haven’t figured out whether it’s faked for comedy or
if
the lunatic interviewer was for real (I suspect the former, but it’s kind
of hard to
tell). The DVD also includes the video for “Someone’s in the Wolf.”
The
music on this album is extremely catchy, but hauntingly complex—something that by nature
shouldn't exist. But for a band like Queens of the
Stone Age, the impossible just
doesn't seem to be out of reach.
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