Score: 8/10
I’m kind of an expert on the Queens of the Stone Age and I’m kind of not, I have to admit. I mean, in a way, I know more about them than I’d like to. There’s the clattering din of that Nick Oliveri drama — the former bassist who apparently inspired the song “Everybody Know That You’re Insane.” And, of course, there’s this recent hullaballoo about lead singer Josh Homme verbally, physically and sexually abusing his kids, a row which led to a custody war and a set of lawsuits, but, as far as I’ve heard, no prosecution.
In other words, the whole situation surrounding the release of this album is pretty messy and in listening to it, I almost feel dirty, like opening up a porn mag I found on the ground. Sure enough, the grunge guitar on opener “Obscenery” comes in and just SOUNDS all dirty, like the Foo Fighters’ lost junkie, hooker-coddling brother. Luckily, though, true to form, this new Queens album is way less “safe” than the Apollonian, orderly dad-rock of the Foo Fighters, and in this way makes for a vastly more enjoyable listen, front to back.
So one thing about this album is that it “does the trick,” so to speak. It makes for a gratifying, absorptive listen, playing like a “full meal” of creative structures and meters, and even a little vaudeville with the entrance of strings on “Carnavoyeur.” Judging by the level of total streams on Spotify, “Carnavoyeur” is apparently the lead single. And really, “Carnavoyeur” is a nice microcosm of this album as a whole — it goes by swiftly and almost materializes as mundane just by its sheer, uniform sludgy dirtiness and lack of apparent semantic objective. Everything seems tongue-in-cheek, like Homme’s later observation that “The world’s gonna end in a month or so”, and this project begins to play as something more like an antidote than a manifesto, like a wave of really pure oxygen, something, of course, in high demand in Homme’s native southern California.
“Sicily”’s weird. So there’s that. It comes in almost like a ballad, then slowly progressing toward a twisted, vaguely threatening grunge rock interface, tickled amusingly by these string shrieks, not entirely unlike, you guessed it, Psycho. So yeah, In Times New Roman…, in general, plays a bit like one giant objective of going out and killing someone. Well, what else is new? It’s par for the course for this band, like that gloriously uncomfortable dirge “Someone’s in the Wolf”, and it’s unsettling mantra of “So glad you could stay forever”. This band is at its best when it’s making us fidget in our seats and reach for our box cutters. And, in closing, “Emotion Sickness” conjeals into some of the most memorable hooks on this LP, and “Straight Jacket Fitness”; with its epic structure and sonic range, is a model in tension and release, capping off the album with some multifarious charisma. And yeah, by the end you feel like going and taking a shower. That’s the point.
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