Queens of the Stone Age’s dark reverie comes to life on their Catacombs tour
By NICK TAVARES
STATIC and FEEDBACK Editor
The sensation was almost immediate.
Sitting in Boston’s Wang Theatre, with the room darkened and crickets chirping through the speakers, we caught sight of Josh Homme, walking through the aisles with a stool over his head and making his way to center stage. He picked up a hand-held lantern, and then his microphone and began the journey of taking this audience back to Paris’ Catacombs and through a deconstructed vision of his band’s deeper catalog.
I, and I’m sure everyone else in attendance, was in awe. This was like nothing I’d ever witnessed. And that kind of haunting magic only continued as the heavy stomp of Queens of the Stone Age’s desert roll merged with a kind of demented, ghostly chamber music.
It’s hard not to get overexcited or to oversell the experience, but it was unlike any other rock show, and it’s going to stay with me for a long, long time.
The program begins with the five-song Alive in the Catacombs set, with Homme singing “Running Joke” unaccompanied, slowly joined by one-by-one by the primary band. The tone for the evening was set immediately — Homme’s voice cut through the near-silent audience and he gestured and lit himself with the lantern, all smiling, demonic crooner as he stalked the stage from one side to the other.
And, for a city that can be less than “polite” or “engaged” in these kinds of settings, there was none of that. The audience was totally captivated, at once in shock and thrilled. This was immediately a gripping performance, and it only grew in majesty from this opening number.
A three-person string section joined for the rest of what the band is calling “Act I,” further tightening their grip on the audience before disappearing behind the curtain. Soon, that was drawn back to reveal the full orchestra and Homme, now dancing with a meat cleaver, slithering while the strings and brass gave “Someone’s In the Wolf” an even more demented twist than that song already has. It transformed further, morphing into “Song for the Deaf,” with Homme now singing in the middle of the audience, and then “Straight Jacket Fitting” before landing back on “Wolf,” nearly 10 minutes of engrossing majesty that was capped by an immediate standing ovation.
Again, I’d never seen anything like this, obviously. I get the vibe that most of the crowd hadn’t either. We were barely a third of the way through the show and I felt like I was going to collapse.
This continued, of course. The band rearranged Them Crooked Vulture’s “Spinning in the Daffodils” to full, string-laden mania. They resurfaced “Mosquito Song” and “Auto Pilot” for the first time in years for this tour, with bassist Mikey Shoes providing vocals on the latter. They’re giving a new song, “Easy Street,” it’s first airing on this abbreviated run. And guitars came back in near full-force for a lurching read on “You Got a Killer Scene There, Man…” and stayed out for most of the night from there.
It’s an obvious testament to the strength of the source material. If it hadn’t already been immediately apparent that Queens of the Stone Age are working on a higher plane than many of their peers, the way these songs can be stripped down, taken apart and rearranged so gracefully and powerfully … this should serve as the final verdict on that. Their status is beyond reproach.
And the star of this circus, of course, is Homme. It’s remarkable to think about how he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of fronting the band in its earliest days, and only sang out of necessity. Now, he’s commanding the stage, occasionally aided by his lantern or knives but mostly just his strutting, confident self, Dean Martin in a gothic bordello, conducting the chamber, directing traffic and shining a light on his bandmates, always absolutely riveting.
The night came to a close much like it had began. Homme, now alone center stage holding a bouquet of flowers, began singing “Long Slow Goodbye” a capella, eventually accompanied by Shoes on vocals and an audience clapping and responding to his direction. At one point, he lowered his microphone, still singing with the crowd in full voice lifting him up, the maestro at the center of this dark, beautiful madness. It was incredible. It will live on long beyond this single evening.
E-mail Nick Tavares at nick@staticandfeedback.com