CD Odyssey Disc 750: Them Crooked Vultures

I am halfway through a really great weekend. I spent Friday hanging with a friend (and making some new ones) and earlier today I got in a game of ulti. Now I’m blogging and soon I’ll take wee nap. Life feels very relaxed and the pressures of the work week seem so long ago. Ah, Saturdays…

Disc 750 is….Self Titled

Artist: Them Crooked Vultures

Year of Release: 2009

What’s up with the Cover?  Behold Vulture-Head: Super Villain. His super power? The ability to pick over the corpses of dead bands to create new ones.

How I Came To Know It: My friend Kelly brought it over once for a games night and it sounded pretty good. After that I’m not sure if he bought it for me, or maybe Sheila or another friend did. Maybe I bought it for myself, and now I’m trying to pretend that didn’t happen. Anyway, now I have my very own copy.

How It Stacks Up: This is the band’s only album to date, so there isn’t anything to stack up against.

Ratings: 2 stars

Superbands are so often less than the sum of their parts, and so it is with “Them Crooked Vultures.” In this case, our stars are John Paul Jones, Dave Grohl and Josh Homme.

This should work for me, I like three of these guys’ former bands (Kyuss, Nirvana and Led Zeppelin) and I can tolerate a fourth (Foo Fighters). The less said about Queens of the Stone Age the better.

The album begins with a bang with “Nobody Loves Me & Neither Do I.” Ill-advised use of the ampersand aside, this is a quality rock song that crunches a pretty sweet groove and even has a bit of menace in it.

Unfortunately moments like this are too few and far between. A lot of the album has too many ideas being crammed into a single song. It makes a lot of them feel overwrought and without direction.

The musicianship is great, particularly the rhythm section. Grohl is an awesome rock drummer and John Paul Jones is clearly enjoying being out from the shadow of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. I also like Josh Homme’s guitar stylings, although I think his fuzzy groove-metal thing in Kyuss is better than the more bluesy style he strives for with Them Crooked Vultures.

But while it is competent, the playing lacks heart. It could be the arrangements, but the band feels like it is always in a hurry, even though they are in perfect time. The songs set up a couple of alternative grooves early on, play them against one another in sometimes jarring fashion and then take forever to bring it to a conclusion. Feeling hurried and still taking too long is not a good combination.

Consider “New Fang” which is a pretty solid song, but just drones on and on at the end. No amount of fuzzy guitar soloing will make up for the fact that the song just stubbornly refuses to resolve when it should. Considering it is under four minutes long, it is even more disappointing.  

The music is better when you focus on the drums and bass. Josh Homme has a solid enough rock voice, but these songs are so bombastic it feels in places like he can’t keep up.

“Scumbag Blues” is a strong track, with a cool riff and an arrangement that plays to Homme’s vocal strengths. His high near-falsetto voice is a welcome tonic to some of the shoutier songs on other parts of the record.

For every restrained bit of rock magic, there is another song that just has way too much going on. Songs with titles like “Interlude with Ludes” and “Caligulove” try to be clever, but just come off as self-indulgent. “Interlude with Ludes” feels like it was written late at night in the middle of a massive bender. Unfortunately once daylight came and everyone heard it they failed to realize it should have been discarded as harmless experimentation.

It is hard to get past the pretentious titles, but with “Caligulove” it is such a cool song – even the ridiculous organ section works – it manages to do so.“Warsaw Or the First Breath You Take After You Give Up” just aren’t good enough to do the same.

For what its worth, most people I know love this record. I don't, but it has its moments and it is worth keeping for the bright spots.

Best tracks: Nobody Loves Me & Neither Do I, Scumbag Blues, Caligulove, Gunman