I know that fans are very, very impatient to listen to this album, just look at the tremendous amount of comments salivating all over the place, posted on YouTube in just a day! But Queens of the Stone Age continue to tease their public by releasing snippets of their upcoming ‘…Like Clockwork’ album… Great expectation, huge anticipation, will the album measure to it? We don’t know yet, but this song, or rather half-song posted on Youtube on Monday, may half-way answer the question. The trick is that the band has posted a 3 minute video for a song that is supposed to last 6 minutes! So you may think there’s something missing after the first listening…. Yeah half of it!
The song, precisely called ‘I appear missing’, has the QOTSA’s dark and grandiose sound, going crescendo with huge guitars, thundering drumming (Dave Grohl?), and Josh Homme’s romantic croon,… a sort of amalgam of their badass previous releases, Rated R-Songs for the Deaf-Lullabies to Paralyze-Era Vulgaris, although fans may argue forever on this.
Looking at the cartoon of the video, there is certainly a death imagery associated with the song: in a post-apocalypse landscape, it starts with a resurrection from death of a man covered by bloody bandages, after he has been half-eaten by crows then wolves in the desert…not your usual bright-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel near-death experience, but rather ‘deeper down the rabbit hole never to be found’ as Homme sings.
By the way, the artwork of the album is by artist Boneface and the animation by Liam Brazier, and this is what this latter had to say about the video:
‘I had the sole (actually rather fun, if tiring) duty of turning Boneface‘s excellently bloody drawings into something somewhere between a motion comic and an abattoir run by Tarantino.’
I am not sure where Elton John fits in the middle of this carnage.