“That way everyone’s happy and it’s more of a party,” Josh Homme once said of the name Queens Of The Stone Age, with its mixture of femininity and machismo, the regal and the raw. Whether it’s a description you agree with or not, there’s no denying QOTSA know how to put on a hell of a bash, as their seven studio albums attest. They’re a mixed bag though, both in terms of quality and musical focus, depending on their fluctuating line-up, at the heart of which is Josh, the band’s hulking, sneering lynchpin. Over the years we’ve had a supergroup spectacular here, a bluesy bad trip there, and much more besides, incrementally adjusting their musical DNA along the way, while also – by being so strange and dark and sordid – adjusting the parameters of what ...
