| August 8, 2002 - Crud Magazine: Songs for the Deaf Review
|
|
by James Berry |
So you release THE rock record of the year 2000. You lay waste to the globe and take festivals for your own. You have the feel good hit of the summer with ‘Feel Good Hit Of The Summer’ and stir up a spatter of controversy along the way. What do you do next? Well releasing THE rock record of 2002 might be a logical option, yeah. But Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri have only gone one better and got THE rock drummer of his generation (and in the top ten of all time, anyone?) and pinned him down to their rotating drum-stool for the entire record.
So you’ll already know that Dave Grohl is back behind the kit, which is quite frankly the only place he belongs. Seeing them at Glastonbury this year, as part of their ‘yeah, just look at us’ jaunt through Europe’s festivals, there was simply no denying that his arms are a force of nature in themselves. If they were firing their ammunition from some kind of desert grenade launcher last time round with ‘Rated R’ then this time it’s some kind of souped-up nuclear mutha of a metal ore cannon that NASA would probably be advised to direct skyward to ward off that fucking huge daddy of a meteorite that’s apparently locked on a vague collision course with us.
The first mammoth pounds of the bass drum as they took to the stage with ‘Feel Good Hit…’ flicked the shudder button at the base of our spines and left us mesmerized throughout. The new record then, ‘Songs For The Deaf’, continues with their angular take on sprawling desert rock, only more so. We can’t remember too many songs specifically – it was Glastonbury and for our expected state of mind we should be excused – but we can remember the ambition contained within each and every new song we heard. And of course the gravel-pit-in-Hades vocals of Mark Lanegan hardly went unnoticed either. Kyuss? But a memory.
go back
|
|
|
