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Most desert rock bands would be out of the crypt like a rocket. But when Queens Of The Stone Age descended into Paris Catacombs to record last year’s acoustic live record and shoot Alive In The Catacombs to an audience of skulls, they clearly unearthed something primal in themselves down there with the dead. Rather than race back to the surface ready to rock, Josh Homme and co. lingered a little in that musty air, not ready yet to brush the bone dust from their sleeves, and made a new album steeped in arcane tones and mausoleum restraint.
It may open, on It’s Only Love, with the sound of some beat-up rustic guitar being played by a sad hobo under a railway bridge, but this is nothing so simple as a nine-track acoustic interlude.
Instead, Perfecth (so named, Homme says, because nothing’s truly perfect) is ingrained with the catacomb spirit: more bewitching than brutal, macabre rather than metallic. It’s Only Love becomes a dark carnival piece, its images of love as a suicide leap (a metaphor repeated later on From The Cliff) given a graceful fatalism by curls of Balkan violin.
Insignificant Other, in which Homme addresses some deceitful bride of the occult (‘How’s your psychobabble, your birth charts and spells working out?’), is a stylish soul slither, casting its own sonic spell of buzzing guitar, winding bass line and otherworldly harmonies. On Where The Goth Girls At?, he sings the praises of black-lipstick love, over guitars that sound strapped into 10-buckle plastic platform boots, and with Frankenstein’s monster on drums.
Befitting its title, Perfecth has a tendency to teeter a little too far into the crooked and bizarre like this. Sunday, originally co-written by Homme for Iggy Pop’s 2016 album Post Pop Depression (which Homme was heavily involved with), successfully laces Scary Monsters-era Bowie with a dash of plastic soul (Homme’s mission to become the new Bowie continues throughout), but Mono is a druggy psych turn-off, all junkyard jazz clatter and strange synth attacks, as if the track is being sabotaged by a rogue mixing desk AI.
The album works far better when it’s more welcoming; on the involving folk of From The Cliff, or on Easy Street, a gorgeous, thigh-slapping acoustic pop thing drenched in poetic self-reflection that will take years of deciphering. It’s only in the last minute of closer Run Away From The Mob that Queens Of The Stone Age’s desert-rock tumult returns full-blast, but it’s been a nourishing detour.
