I like Queens of the Stone Age, but the fact is that this is the best band Josh Homme has ever had anything to do with.
Possibly the definitive stoner rock band, Kyuss sound like a dense fog of bong smoke rolling across an endless desert highway. Or like a bunch of guys from California playing scuzzy down-tuned rock. Whatever.
They sound like the sort of band that would be fronted by Blackout, the badass Decepticon that transforms into a helicopter and totally fucks up a US military base in the movie. This is not least because the double-bass drumming on their first record sounds like the blades of a Sikorsky Pave Low helicopter ploughing through a field filled with fat people.
Which is all just another way of saying that I don't know a single useful fact about this band, reducing this whole blog-farce to an exercise in stringing together words and phrases like bludgeoning, throat shredding, mammoth riffpocalypse, filthy grind bastards and ploughing through a field filled with fat people.
I've only ever listened to the first record by these guys (they released a second a few years back while I wasn't paying any attention), but it's a fucking doom drone masterpiece.
Of course, the standard reference point for all things drone is the mighty Sunn O))). Hyatari plough a less grimm furrow, a little more up tempo and tuneful - as if Sunn O))) acquired some pop sensibilities and decided to make an album full of cheery summer fun. Except that because it's Sunn O))), that still sounds like a colossal lead casket filled with tar floating through space and annihilating the stars.
One of the most enduring memories of my years of retail servitude is the tyranny of public performance licences, and the dreary tedium of having to listen to the same limited selection of mix CDs each day. Working on the basic principle that mediocre dance music is far less offensive than mediocre rock music, my part timer Jeff McDeath and I would regularly stick in the dance mix CD and spend our weekday mornings body-popping to fat beats.
One of the standout tracks on that CD was the Tom Middelton "Cosmos" remix of Mass Destruction by Faithless. It was all dense, bass-heavy electronica, and for the first time I found myself wondering if maybe Faithless were worth more of a listen.
For a long time they never quite made sense to me outside of work; until a few days ago, when my ipod spat Take The Long Way Home into my ears as I cycled to work. And then I realised the magic of Faithless lay in their ability to make mundane activities (working in a shop, cycling along the A4174, being in a nightclub) seem epically euphoric.
The first time I heard Oxbow, I didn't like them. Admittedly it wasn't the full band, just guitarist Niko Wenner and vocalist Eugene Robinson performing some kind of stripped down avant garde howlfest in support of Isis when they toured the UK some years ago; but it was still an assault on the senses that I wasn't entirely prepared for.
Fast forward a few years, and I've legitimately acquired a free copy of the very excellent We Are Going To Track Down And Kill Vintage Claytah The Beard Burning Bastard by Manatees. The whole record's great, but the stand out track is The Pulp Cut; and the main reason is the guest vocals provided by none other than Eugene Robinson of Oxbow.
And so I go back and give Oxbow another go. And I'm still not sure if I like them, but I'll be damned if I can stop listening to them.
They sound kind of like Enablers, if Pete Simonelli was a sexually aggressive black man that spent all of his free time having bad acid freakouts in post apocalypse jazz clubs.
