Rapid Fire Reviews: Various Rock Capital V with Queens Of The Stone Age, HMLTD, & The Hold Steady
These are just three functionally unaffiliated bands who all are technically under the exceedingly large umbrella of "rock" that I wanted to cover.
In Times New Roman... - Queens Of The Stone Age
With a full decade between the release of Queens Of The Stone Age's excellent album Like Clockwork and now, I'm comfortable saying that I don't like this band as much as everyone else does. I appreciate the one-two punch of Rated R and Songs For The Deaf, and Like Clockwork sees the band sounding better than they had any right to in their career. But now 8 albums into their career I still consider myself a picky fan and I wasn't crazy about the singles from this album. One thing I can say in favor of this record is that it sees the band taking risks they weren't willing to on their previous album. By that metric alone this project is an improvement on the safe sounds of Villains or Era Vulgaris. But despite that experimentation, much of the corny blues rock that has always bothered me about the band persists.
The best examples are tracks like Paper Machete and Made To Parade which do have either good fundamentals or interesting sonic textures. But ultimately they're held back from being truly great songs by corny refrains and occasionally quite lumpy guitar work. Some of the same dorky theatricality comes back on Sicily later on the album. The second single Carnavoyer has grown on me a bit and it comes back to back with another highlight in the surf-punky What The Peephole Say in the middle of the album. I can also say that about Emotion Sickness which I didn't care for much at all on first listen. While I wouldn't quite call it a favorite I do think I've come around to some of its more heavy-handed compositional tricks. Much has been made of the album's 9-minute closer Straight Jacket Fitting which is fair given that it makes up a fifth of the album's runtime all on its own. Thankfully I like it quite a bit with the same kind of churning desert rock for much of the song which ends up being played out by this marauding spacey jam at the end to close off the tracklist. It kind of gives the impression of the sun setting on the album in a way I appreciate.
While I like Times New Roman more than Queens Of The Stone Age's last album. it still just reads as very okay to me within the greater context of modern rock. The band still might have an edge over some of their far tackier radio contemporaries, but this album doesn't really excite me the way their best work has in the past. It has its moments and I like more of it than I don't, but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets difficult to recall much of the album by the end of the year. 6/10
The Worm - HMLTD
I didn't get the chance to review HMLTD's 2020 debut West Of Eden but I wanted to. While I thought the album was decent I was more just interested in the group as a unique point in the bubbling post-punk culture. That's why when I heard the great single Wyrmlands from this new album I got really excited. I thought that if the band could turn their sophomore album into a more consistent and more conceptual representation of their music they could do something amazing. Unfortunately, that's not what happened. But I still want to put my thoughts on the record out in some capacity even if I find it to be a disappointment.
My issues with the album come pretty much immediately after the first two tracks. The record's attempts to be thematic often come VERY heavy-handed in a way that feels like a 9th-grade theater production. The theater kid vibes don't really ever go away either. Despite some intrigue in the world and story of the album the way they choose to spin these narratives comes off as silly more than anything else. My favorite deep cuts on the record then end up being the least theatrical and arguably least important moments to the narrative like the anguished alt-rock anthem Saddest Worm Ever. I really do appreciate what the band is attempting here. Even though I'm susceptible to cringe this is far from the worst indulgence of theatercore elements I've ever heard. Their songwriting is too frenetic and their storytelling too uniquely weird to fall into any kind of tropes. But across the entire second half of this album it just becomes so easy to be disillusioned with the presentation of information. It really does feel so expositional and as the dramatic swelling instrumentation begins to get really old, it feels harder to stay with the concept as well. At the vert least this album continued to have me interested in HMLTD's potential, even if I can't see myself ever coming around to much of it. 5/10
The Price Of Progress - The Hold Steady
The Hold Steady are a band that tends to swing back and forth with me. After getting into much of their output in the 2000s, I wasn't nearly as crazy about their 2010s. That was at least until they released their 2019 album Thrashin Thru The Passion which really knocked my socks off. It's up there with my favorite projects from the band to date. Unfortunately, I wasn't crazy about their 2021 follow-up Open Door Policy. After I came away from the three singles on this album somewhat mixed, I really wasn't sure what to expect. While I'm not in love with the intro track I still like the lead single Sideways Skull a lot which contains all the hallmarks of a great Hold Steady song and jolts some energy into the album early on.
The album really does keep it up after that with Carlos Is Crying which tells a surprisingly sad story in the hilariously detailed way that only Craig Finn can. While I wasn't crazy about Understudies at first every time I hear the song I like it more and more. Sure it's a little on the theatrical side but it has the depth of instrumentation to back it up and the dramatic moments work on me more than they did when it was a single. Unfortunately, after that point, things start to go awry. Sixers sounds even more lame to me than it did on first listen while the often aimless borderline spoken word refrains on The Birdwatchers get kind of annoying quickly. City At Eleven has some major pacing issues, particularly in the first half and I don't really think the lyrics are as clever as they sound. While the final run of songs aren't loudly annoying, they do represent a more boring shift for the album that I was somewhat disappointed by. Even though the sauntering ballad Distortions Of Faith has plenty of memorable lyrical moments, I'm just not crazy about the song as a whole.
I don't dislike this album, far from it. For a band with some pretty serious weak points in their discography this isn't the bottom of the barrel. But it is decisively average by Hold Steady standards and despite my excitement this isn't the follow-up to Thrashin that I was hoping for. 5.5/10
