August 2002 - Recoil: Songs for the Deaf Review
by AW
QOTSA frontman Josh Homme recently described the importance of his band thusly: "We are the heaviest of the anti-scene. If you like rock music but you hate Creed and rap-metal, you need somewhere to go." Point taken, thank you. This is rock music with BIG drums (courtesy of none other than David Grohl) and even BIGGER guitars. Here's the catch: these are actual songs with actual melodic structure. Queens of the Stone Age is what happens when Bowie meets Black Sabbath. "You Think I Aint Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire" starts with a rock jock from KLON (pronounced "clone") radio-hyping the record ("Songs For The Deaf - you can't even hear it!" he shouts). Then the riff, barely audible at first, creeps up on you. It's so quiet you eventually reach for the volume to turn it up and BAM! All of the sudden you're smack dab in the middle of a full-on throwdown. The rock continues with "No One Knows," "First It Giveth," "Song For The Dead" and "The Sky Is Falling," giving Songs For The Deaf the strongest first-five-song punch I've heard this year. This band is so refreshingly oblivious to the current batch of hard rockers that one hesitates to even call them a hard rock band. Call it conceptual or neo-psychedelic, but don't call it hard rock. They are better than that.

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