Album review: In New Times Roman, Queens of the Stone Age
Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age, pictured a few years ago speaking to the students of BIMM Dublin. Picture: Ruth Medjber
- Queens of the Stone Age
- In New Times Roman
- ★★★★☆
For hard-living rockers, middle age is a time of life fraught with complications. In the past seven years, Queens of the Stone Age leader Josh Homme has lost a number of friends, including collaborators Mark Lanegan and Taylor Hawkins, and gone through a messy divorce from Distillers singer Brody Dalle.
Coming out of that gale force of trauma, Homme says he has struggled to make new music. But that pain and stress have motivated him as a songwriter, and In New Times Roman, QOTSA’s first record since 2017, is a monument to rawness and emotional openness.
Homme was always something other than a headbanger. In his singing and machine-tooled guitar playing, he has blended machismo, vulnerability, swagger, and honesty.With New Times Roman, he adds a sense of impending doom: this LP often spirals into angst and hopelessness but also rages against the dying of the light. If he is going down, Homme is doing so fighting – and that spark of curmudgeonly defiance gives the album its life force.
The singer recently turned 50, and his voice has taken on a Bowie-esque sense of cracked grandeur with age. The spirit of the Thin White Duke’s 1977 cold-funk masterpiece Station To Station is evoked on Time & Place, fuelled by Homme’s pummelling falsetto.
The Bowie blitzkrieg continues on Carnavoyeur, where Homme sounds – and this is very much a positive – that he’s trying out for the part of Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth.
Yet there is little fantastical about Homme’s lyrics, which orbit themes of midlife malaise and inevitable march into irrelevance.
“They’re out to get you aren’t they?” he rasps on post-punk chugger Paper Machete. “They kids, the man, the chicks, the breaks.”
He sounds like someone at the end of the tether. But from dark times, he has created a record that hits like a hurricane.
