The Californian libertines return to stoner rock with precise brute force.
There they are again, the three mysterious ellipses in the album title. But anyone expecting IN TIMES NEW ROMAN… a sequel or, in this case, a prequel to the ominous 2013 obscurity …LIKE CLOCKWORK will be disappointed or even relieved. The Queens’ eighth album doesn’t have too much in common with the opposite record VILLAINS produced by Mark Ronson on Hit either. The glitter is blown away, the strokes-isms of “The Way You Used To Do” are back in the garage rock garage.
IN TIMES NEW ROMAN… is the solemn culmination of the sound that made QOTSA one of the most important rock bands of the 21st century: at first hearing, incomprehensible dangling riffs, Godzilla-heavy grooves and hook-beating song structures like in “Carnavoyeur”, which inspired us from the dragged into a Halloween theme park roller coaster, only to be trampled by a Black Parade at the end.
In addition there are powerful refrains, which Josh Homme’s falsetto pulls into the sky like in the opener “Obscenery”, where they supposedly rest briefly on clouds of strings, but secretly soak up water, only to then crash down on us in the downpour. We encounter the strings again and again, for example they refine the piece “Sicily” into “Kashmir” by John Paul Jones’ old co-vulture Homme.
A lot of heart, a lot of pain, but also a lot, a lot of strength
Another longtime friend sings along in the background on “Emotion Sickness”: Arctic Monkey Matt Helders. “Paper Machete” riff-rocks the returning Hives aside and by the end of the nine-minute western epic “Straight Jacket Fitting” we’ve come full circle and swallowed the dust of the Californian desert.
In terms of content, Homme deals with the dirty separation from his wife Brody Dalle (Homme now has sole custody of their three children together) in lines that are hardly cryptic, such as “Now I know you’d use anything, anyone, to make yourself look clean (…) My love is dead”, “You speak lioness & damsel in distress so fuently / Does your every single relation end in pain and misery?” or “Don’t say you love me no more / Thought we was equals / Broken people keep score” suggests that. A heartbreak album with exactly that: a lot of heart, a lot of pain, but also a lot, a lot of power.