In my search for new music to talk about this week, I googled "top 10 rock albums of 2013". I looked at many different lists and saw that one common up on many of them was Queens of the Stone Age's new album, ...Like Clockwork. I looked it up and saw that it had reached number 1 on the Billboard 200. I decided to listen to it.
One word to describe it? Blaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Ok, ok, fine. One real word to describe it? Average.
Now, I'm going to say this up front: I did not dislike it. They're not a bad band - hey, if you've got David Grohl and members from ZZ Top involved sometimes, you're obviously pretty good. It's not a bad album. It's not bad music. There's nothing actually bad about it. It's just painfully, superbly, amazingly average.
Let me start off with a little basis for those of you who haven't heard of or listened to them before. Queens of the Stone Age are an alternative rock band from California, currently made up of Josh Homme, Troy Van Leeuwen, Michael Shuman, Dean Feritita and Jon Theodore. They've been together for almost 20 years now.
I went into listening to the album with relatively high hopes - after all the raving, I expected it to be a pretty good album. I'd listened to a few of the older songs a while back and remembered not being blown away but thinking it was pretty good music and was curious what this album had to offer.
Listening to the first song, Keep Your Eyes Peeled, I was a bit disappointed. The style of the music wasn't really to my tastes at all but I thought I could get over it if the music was good. I listen to plenty of different genres. The thing that bugged me out the song was just how generic it sounded - that on top of the repetitiveness. The song never changed. But I kept going, thinking maybe the music would pick up later. But the songs really never changed - it was all mid-range, similar chord progressions, same generic blues rock sound. At My God is the Sun, the fifth song on the album, I started listening a little closer because it started off sounding a little different - less blues-y, a little more hard rock. Unfortunately, it petered back out to sounding just like the rest of them.
The thing that bugged me most was lack of musicality. I don't know if it was a style they were attempting, but the songs were very flat. There wasn't much of a dynamic arc in their songs, or a clear musical structure. In a few songs there was a clear high point, with heavier sound and a slightly different chord progression, but after that moment it was often dropped off and the song reverted back to exactly what the rest of it had sounded like. The whole album also barely followed any structure. It was just a long chain of similar songs with a very anticlimactic finale with their final song, ...Like Clockwork.
As I've said, I don't think it was a bad album at all. I just definitely do not understand what all the raving was about. It was a very generic album with very little musicality or personality.
No comments:
Post a Comment