Album Review: Queens Of The Stone Age - '...Like Clockwork'

Bands like Queens Of The Stone Age don't come around too often. After all, there's not a great deal of bands that have a crossover appeal like theirs, managing to create music that can go across just about anyone's musical taste in the contemporary music world. With that said, after three years of relative silence, and another three years of promising fans that their album would be out by 'the end of the year,' the follow up to 2007's 'Era Vulgaris,' '...Like Clockwork' obviously has a lot of hype surrounding it and expectations to live up to.

Kicking things off with the sludgy, fuzzy tones of 'Keep Your Eyes Peeled,' QOTSA deliver a hazy opener, showcasing vocalist Josh Homme's typical signature style, and managing to give us a track that at times sounds airy and empty, other as full as anything, and even at others somehow managing to give a strange mixture of the two. The track makes it fairly obvious to anyone listening. QOTSA are back, and anyone who thought that in the past six years they may have lost their touch couldn't be more wrong.
 

Homme is well and truly on the top of his game vocally on this record. While he isn't necessarily doing anything outrageously new, everything he does is just improvement on an already strong voice, delivering some fantastically emotionally lines, and one of the much better falsetto's in modern rock. Not only him, but the rest of the band show off their skills in big ways throughout the record, with the rhythm section shining through in tracks like 'I Sat By The Ocean,' or the bass-driven 'If I Had A Tail,' and some very solid lead guitar work and harmonies on tracks such as 'My God Is The Sun,' and 'Fairweather Friends.'
 

One of the most talked about aspects of the album has been the large amount of guest vocals, with tracks featuring ex-QOTSA members Mark Lanegan and Nick Oliveri, Jake Shears from the Scissor Sisters, The Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner, and even the likes of Trent Reznor and Sir Elton John. However, with all these big names on the record, at no point is the spotlight taken off Homme as a vocalist. The rest simply providing backing vocals to the track. That isn't to understate their contribution to the record, with these backing vocals being a powerful addition to any song they are a part of, specifically 'Fairweather Friends,' featuring vocals from all of the above mentioned (aside from Jake Shears).

There's quite a bit of diversity here, with the hazy, airy tracks we've come to expect like 'Keep Your Eyes Peeled,' and 'If I Had A Tail,' in amongst hard hitting rock tracks like 'My God Is The Sun,' and Fairweather Friends,' which also contrast to piano-driven tracks like 'The Vampyre of Time and Memory' or title track '...Like Clockwork,' and emotionally charged tracks such as 'I Appear Missing.'

'...Like Clockwork' heralds a very strong return for Queens Of The Stone Age, which is bound to be well received by fans worldwide. The album showcases each member of the band at their finest, and will have something new for you with each listen for a long time to come.

1. Keep Your Eyes Peeled
2. I Sat By The Ocean
3. The Vampyre of Time and Memory
4. If I Had A Tail
5. My God Is The Sun
6. Kalopsia
7. Fairweather Friends
8. Smooth Sailing
9. I Appear Missing
10. ...Like Clockwork