Lovelingly pinched from Pitchfork: It was fitting that the final release from Kyuss featured a cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Into the Void’, because throughout their seven-year existence, the Palm Desert quartet essentially existed in one– the band’s devastating stoner-rock earned the respect of various celebrity admirers (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden among them) but they never successfully sold it to the masses. That Sabbath cover appeared on a post-break-up 1996 split EP, the flipside of which featured three songs by a new project formed by ex-Kyuss members Josh Homme and Alfredo Hernandez.

True to the project’s feminizing name, Queens of the Stone Age, the new material boasted a more melodic, loose-limbed variation on Kyuss’ earthquaking crunch. Still, there was little indication that the Queens were going to have any more commercial impact than Nebula, the Wellwater Conspiracy, the Atomic Bitchwax, or any of the other many 70s-styled psych-rock acts orbiting around at the time. The fact that Homme was concurrently indulging in his free-form, revolving-door Desert Sessions jams made the idea of this clean-cut sideman becoming a post-millennial rock star seem all the more unlikely.

Likewise, the Queens’ 1998 self-titled full-length has always sounded more like a document of where the band was coming from than a certain prophecy of their platinum-gilded future. In contrast to the guest list-stacked, stylistically varied, conceptually structured nature of 2000′s Rated R, and 2002′s Songs for the Deaf, Queens of the Stone Age was primarily a two-man effort by Homme– who handled both guitar and bass duties– and Hernandez. (Future bassist Nick Oliveri’s services are limited to a recorded voicemail message.) Not surprisingly, it’s the band’s most monochromatic album, coaxing maximum power out of minimal one-chord rave-ups like the opening ‘Regular John’, which craftily applies 70s proto-metal riffage to i ts avant-garde inverse, Krautrock repetition.

Continue reading: Pitchfork: Album Reviews: Queens of the Stone Age: Queens of the Stone Age [Reissue].