Queens of the Stone Age

Fans expecting an album as heavy as QOTSA's debut might be a little disappointed in R, but the brute force of the band's heavy stoner rock still packs quite a wallop! "The Feel-Good Hit…" and the acid-tinged "In the Fade" (with Screaming Trees' Mark Lanegan on vocals) prove that while the musical atmosphere is thick, there's enough serrated melody to slice through.

The California desert: home of hot-rod proving grounds, heat hallucinations, alien
abductions. It was the home, too, of Kyuss, a quartet started in the late Eighties by the
teenage Josh Homme, a burnout visionary for what became a viable music subcategory by
the late Nineties: stoner rock. What stoner rock delivers, slowed down and magnified, is
the riff, the persistent legacy of Mississippi blues. Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbat... More >

Masters of unreality ("Feel Good Hit of the Summer," "Monsters in the Parasol"). (Grade - ***)