It’s supposed to be fun. This, one suspects, is why Josh Homme takes periodic breaks from the strife of maintaining (or failing to maintain) a many-headed beast like QOTSA – hence therapeutic Desert Sessions records, cameos with Melissa ADM and this gnarly little artefact, a split between himself and a Mister Jesse ‘The Devil’ Hughes, who by all accounts is somewhere between Arthur Brown and whack-job cartoonist Joe Gore on the Helter Skelter Geiger count.
The sound itself is not so much death metal as an monster truck mish-mash of tweaker punk, 70s steroid glam, 60s stoner rock, Gene Vincent twitchiness and, of all things, a Canned Heat fetish. Hughes plays guitar and vocalises; Homme sings backup and drums.
I like their style – or lack of it – four-on-the-floor stomps, fat and fuzzy barre chords that start off as chug-a-lug ZZ Top meets Royal Trux endless boogies before inevitably taking a left turn into some unanticipated chord change that lends the whole enterprise a gratifyingly skewed feel - like that horrible moment in Deliverance when it dawns on the viewer what nasty business those gap-toothed swamp-billies are really about.
Pick a track and throw darts at it: ‘I Only Want You’, ‘So Easy’, ‘Midnight Creeper’ . . . they all ooze equal amounts of Yew shore do got a purty mouth lasciviousness. And in keeping with the video nasty feel, there’s the ear thing. No-one’s going to tell me a long cherished soft spot for Stealer’s Wheel outweighs Michael Madsen’s Reservoir Dogs dance steps as motivation for a shit-eating lurch at ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’.
Like I said, fun. No grand statements, no contrivance or cleverality; just the kind of record one throws on between Blue Cheer and the Dead Boys at a derelict house cider-keg debauch on a midsummer’s night in the sticks.