On Straight Jacket Fitting, the epic nine-minute finale that finds him contemplating insanity both within and without, Joshua Homme sings, ‘To face down your demons, you gotta free them.’ Consider In Times New Roman…, the eighth time he’s led Queens Of The Stone Age into the fray, as an exorcism of several years’ worth of particularly heavy situations. The tricksterish spirit of their music remains, but where once was good humour, now the predominant mode is pitch-black, taking in the loss of his close friends Taylor Hawkins and Mark Lanegan, his cancer diagnosis, and his divorce. As a starting point, Obscenery establishes several of the album’s juxtapositions, moving from jerky robo-funk riffage through a sassy bridge into a grandiose chorus, while lyrics veer from th...