2023-07-05 10:28:38
Josh Homme, leader of the group Queens Of The Stone Age, at the Nuits de Fourvière, in Lyon, July 4, 2023. QUENTIN LAFONT
His music was born in the arid Coachella Valley, California, when his first band, Kyuss, one of the founders of stoner rock, organized wild gigs around Palm Desert in the early 1990s. With environmentally unfriendly generators and magic substances. The word “stoner” refers, in fact, less to the rock in which these heavy rhythms seemed to be carved than to its familiar extension designating a stoned individual. The Californian singer, guitarist and producer Josh Homme also kept it for the variable geometry formation which was to succeed Kyuss, in 1996, and enjoy massive success: Queens of the Stone Age.
To this one, headliner in the summer festivals after five years of absence, Lyon has reserved its Gallo-Roman theater for the 29th edition of the Nuits de Fourvière. The setting may have reminded Josh Homme of the outdoor lecture halls of the American college circuit. The “Queens of the Stone Age”, of which he is leader, composer and only member present since the beginning, have just published an eighth studio album with a title predestined to be played at Fourvière: In Times New Roman… It adds nothing new to the building, after Villains (2017), attempt to renew towards dance music with a production by Mark Ronson, collaborator of Amy Winehouse or Lady Gaga. The two impeccable singles Emotion Sickness (with his slide guitar worthy of Duane Allman) and the boiling Paper Machete hardly mask the regressive aspect of the rest. Even if the mood of Josh Homme, who went through a tumultuous divorce with Australian singer Brody Dalle in 2019 and had to treat cancer in 2022, is more dark than sensual debauchery.
But, on stage, the flint is still just as sharp and cutting. The redheaded giant, who now looks like a Civil War soldier, with his flyaway locks and gray goatee, stands in front of a crowded, overwhelmingly male arcing pit. The first chords of No One Knows trigger a war of riffs between three guitars, under fiery red and yellow lighting. The Lyon public reacted immediately: the sign of the devil’s horns spread and a few reckless people inaugurated the first slams. Josh Homme’s voice seems, in fact, possessed by the Evil One, with a duality shared between hoarseness and falsetto.
Openness
Fortunately, these children of Black Sabbath do not limit themselves to the grammar of metal, as evidenced by Smooth Sailinga torrid funk where we guess the shadow of Prince, which we find in Make It Wit Chu. The boogie rock of The Way We Used To Do seems to owe everything to the Texans of ZZ Top, but projecting itself into a futuristic dimension. If I Had a Tail naturally combines a disco bass and glam guitars. This syncretism has made Queens of the Stone Age a creative group, with no serious competitor in a modern rock often confined to revivalism.
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