Homme sweet Homme Queens of the Stone Age's Lullabies To Paralyze BY KEN MICALLEF

Far out in the California desert, hours from the city sprawl of LA, past sad towns like Slab City, where ghost towns are as ubiquitous as the sun, a small group of punk- and metal-inspired ’90s musicians found an oasis where they created something new on the rocky landscape — a stoner guitar grunge full of scorched-earth melodies, slow-lava rhythms, and heavy-lidded textures as surreal as a peyote daydream. Dragging generators into the vulture-filled canyons, these industrious rockers — among them rich-kid-gone-bad Josh Homme — came from lush desert towns like Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, and Cathedral City to form the nucleus of Kyuss and, eventually, an entire scene built around Desert Session compilations. As legend has it, bikers, bands of groupies, and even seniors initially annoyed at the racket joined the musicians to rock the nights away, terrorizing reptiles and small animals with a massive, messy squall of detuned metal guitar riffs and sludgy beats that would coalesce as the Homme-led band Queens of the Stone Age.

Fast-forward to the present, where Homme, who remains involved in such projects as Eagles of Death Metal and the Desert Sessions recordings, is on his way to being one of the more unlikely rock stars in quite some time. From the ashes of Kyuss’s deep-bottomed grooves rose the Queens, an outfit that paired Homme and long-time drug buddy/Kyuss bassist Nick Oliveri with what’s become a revolving cast of drummers (including Foo Fighter Dave Grohl). Homme and Oliveri played off each other to bring muscle and mayhem to Queens recordings, Homme the high-cheekboned pretty boy to Oliveri’s Fu Manchu–wearing biker thug. Their homonymous 1998 debut, a freak flash of oily grooves and hypnotic riffs, was Homme’s version of "chasing ZZ Top." Its follow-up, 2000’s Rated R (Interscope), added heft to an already heavy sound. The opening salvo offered a mantra-like mission statement: "Nicotine-Valium-Vicodin-Marijuana-Ecstasy-and-Alcohol-Co-co-co-co-co-cocaine." Then, just as fears that rock was dead were reaching their peak, Queens of the Stone Age delivered the biggie: 2003’s Songs for the Deaf (Interscope), a multi-platinum juggernaut of hypno-rock grooves and brutally blunt guitar riffs spiked with cactus-sharp melodic hooks. Grohl and Oliveri locked into such unwavering trance-inducing rhythms that yet another label was born: "robot rock."

But there was more to Songs than first met the ear. Homme tracked Grohl’s drums separately from the cymbals, and the cymbals separately from the hi-hat. Recording each part of Grohl’s drum kit solo allowed for incredible compression and separation: Homme had created a rock album like no other. Grohl’s goliathan beats took on an otherworldly ferocity. Homme’s vocals — a lazy, liquidy rock coo topped with girly falsettos — were the final touch that ensured "No One Knows" and "First It Giveth" would become the foundation of a new rock canon. Rock and roll wasn’t dead after all. But the stakes had been raised for Homme and the next Queens album — the new Lullabies To Paralyze (Interscope).

Homme has had two years to ponder his next move. He complicated matters by firing Oliveri. And with Grohl busy recording a new Foo Fighters disc, he had to put together an entirely new band, the one he’ll bring to the Roxy this Monday. (Homme denied Internet rumors that Oliveri may be rejoining the Queens: he did, however, confirm that he plans to work with Nick on other projects.)

Has Homme’s desert-rock fantasy finally run its course?

"There is a combination of seeing what your detractors say, what people are hoping for in a positive way, and comparing that to your earlier records, and then seeing what songs we have to make up something different." He delivers this fractured comment on the phone from an abandoned airport hangar in Austin, where the new Queens are about to perform to a South by Southwest audience. "The amalgam of all of that is that Lullabies To Paralyze is like a dark fairy tale, ya know? So it seemed like we should start off with a couple of one-two punches and then at ‘Someone’s in the Wolf’ it goes twilight and starts to get really dark. I like to work very dark because the reach for the light makes the darkness more uplifting than depressing. I wanted to keep the album away from ‘It’s been a while since I loved myself.’ It is okay to be confessional, but I don’t want it to be a journal entry."

Although Homme doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks of Lullabies, it’s obvious from the first single, "Little Sister," that this Queens line-up can hang with anyone, anytime, anywhere. Drummer Joey Castillo and multi-instrumentalists Troy Van Leeuwen and Alain Johannes (with occasional contributions from former Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan) ably handle the psychedelic stoner vibe of "I Never Came" and the ghostly "Burn the Witch" (which features vocals and lead guitar by ZZ Top’s Billy F. Gibbons) as well as the discomforting heart-of-darkness epics "Someone’s in the Wolf" and "The Blood Is Love." With its surging riffs and ghoulish chorus, "Everybody Knows That You’re Insane" wouldn’t be out of place on Songs from the Deaf. "Little Sister," on the other hand, is a one-take performance that sounds more like a Moby-Grape-meets-Devo hybrid then a trad Queens tune. With everything from sweet reveries to smack-down thumpers, along with touches of orchestral experimentation, Lullabies To Paralyze is too expansive to be Songs for the Deaf II. And though the guitars still growl and squeal, the groove factor is different.

"When it came to Songs for the Deaf," Homme recalls, "Dave Grohl had such a great understanding of song and how repetition creates that trancelike environment. Dave and I had agreed that we would find these moments where he would really cut loose and then we would return to the trance so that it wasn’t going nuts all of the time. For Lullabies, Joey and I wanted to go back to the earlier Queens kind of trance, where it is not about showing off. Joey can do what Dave can do — they are in that category where no one is better than the other person. So it became more song-oriented and just laying down the trance and going for that repetition thing."

That repetition thing, though lighter in style and substance than on Songs for the Deaf, is what holds the album together. "Everybody Knows That You Are Insane," "Someone’s in the Wolf," and "The Blood Is Love" are all about hypnosis, mind locks, and instrumental precision. Repetition saturates Lullabies like a recurring nightmare.

"It builds a lot of tension to hold on to something until you are used to hearing it repeat, repeat, then you make the smallest change and it really becomes a massive change," Homme says. "It ends up being more about what you did not play as opposed to what you did. When musicians are kind of insecure, they try to show off — it’s much more difficult to play one note than it is to play 50. As a kid, I loved blues players, and that wasn’t about soloing, it was about making one note sing like a vocal melody. When I first started to do Queens, in 1997, it was about playing a succinct, completed thought. I was doing this trance stuff and a friend turned me on to Can and Brian Eno and [Iggy Pop’s] The Idiot, and I saw similarities in what I was starting to do and what they’d already done."

And for all the talk of Nick Oliveri being the real stoner in Queens of the Stone Age, his loss hasn’t affected the band’s musical sensibility.

"One of the things that I had heard from people early on," Homme contends, "is that Nick is the hard, aggressive inner core of the band and now it’s going to be all mellow. But this is the record that needed to get made now. I know that we could have come off like Slayer. But it was more important to play songs like ‘I Never Came’ and ‘Long Slow Goodbye’ despite what Joe Shit the rack man might think.

"And Nick is not with us today. But that is not because of his hard partying. I still do what I always did. I have a good time and I am not a slave to any drug. That is what is more important, that you do something and it doesn’t control you. You use it before it starts using you back. I am still on the same program, which is do a little bit of everything all the time."

Homme is as unapologetic about the new album as he is about his lifestyle. "There is nothing that I would change about the album. Music is very selfish and masturbatorial. It’s selfish for the listener, for the maker, for everyone. So it needs to start with us, something that we are very passionate about making and wanting to listen to. That way, it’s a success when we’re done. The other factors: getting nine stars out of 10 or selling tons of records, those aren’t up to me."

He is, however, a little defensive when it comes to people saying that Lullabies is a "mellow" album. "People think heavy means distortion and I think it is delivery. I grew up playing parties, and so the necessity for groove was pounded into my brain. If you are going to party, you need to groove. A lot of the desert bands were really slinky, and that has always been a desire of mine. How to be sweet enough for the chicks and tough enough for the dudes at the same time? I would rather the chicks get into heavy music than me playing to a bunch of dudes all the time."

So it’s lullabies for chicks that also paralyze the dudes?

"Yes. For Queens of the Stone Age."

Queens of the Stone Age play an officially sold-out show (617-931-2000) this Monday, March 28, at the Roxy, 279 Tremont Street in Boston's Theater District.