Published on Mar 8, 2005
I remember listening to arguments in my college newspaper
newsroom about Wilco and Queens of the Stone Age being real rock
vs. The Hives/Vines/White Stripes being real rock. It wasn’t as
vicious as a Beatles vs. Stones slugfest, but the smarmy conceit of
QOTSA fans reminded me of those of us who prefer King Crimson and
Yes to such mindless fare as, say, Neil Diamond.
So this release was supposed to save rock and roll, based on the
early reviews, but the final product is more of a letdown. Sure,
QOTSA is a thinking man’s rock band, a cross between Blue Oyster
Cult and the Foo Fighters with a Crimson mentality, and they do
rock, but
Songs For The Deaf is treated as an inside joke, with only
the two-person band understanding the meaning. As such, it’s hard
to feel connected, and the CD wears thin after more than one
spin.
The whole concept is a night of music on the AM radio. Fake DJs
appear between songs to joke around, breaking up the songs and
monotony, which one will notice quickly because for whatever
reason, the simulated “radio” sounds like the cheap Wal-Mart kind.
Everything here is flat and quiet, like the musicians put towels
over the speakers before recording. It’s an odd way to record and
it doesn’t work, especially with a band that knows how to rock.
The songs themselves tend to get a bit old, as the duo (and
studio musicians) rarely stray from mid-tempo power chords. The
longer songs are just repetitive with false endings, and for a band
that is obviously talented, there are few flourishes here to
separate this from standard modern rock fare.
This is not to say the band isn’t talented. “No One Knows” won a
Grammy for Best Rock Song, and it is pretty good (actually, when I
saw the band live, they were playing it until some roadies dumped
ping-pong balls on their heads right before the Chili Peppers went
on. You had to be there). “Go With The Flow” is pretty catchy, and
“God Is In The Radio” has a marching-drum intro and some pretty
cool stop-start work during the chorus. The closing acoustic
“Mosquito Song” is good as well; there should have been more like
this on the album.
However, the worst moments of this disc are just interminable,
like the 13 minutes that make up “Song For The Deaf” and “The Sky
Is Fallin’.” Stuff like “Another Love Song” and “Song For The Dead”
are mid-tempo, boring, tinny-sounding and a waste of time.
There is some good material here, but it’s not good enough to
recommend as a whole. At the time, the creators probably thought
they had rock’s savior album on their hands, but now it seems like
an inside joke by a band who tried to prove they were better than
everyone else and failed.