Since I am about to see Queens of the Stone Age this week – they announced a show at the last minute and I got a ticket by pure luck, as I was in front of my computer at the right time – I would like to celebrate their good tastes for covers. The band has effectively done a certain number of cover songs, and this is not an easy art. If everybody can learn somebody else’s song, not everyone can appropriate it, transform it without torture it, and QOSTA does exactly this: they manage to make the songs their owns by injecting in them their unique sound, while always remaining loyal to the originals. So here are some of their best covers.
They covered two songs by The Kinks, ‘Who’ll Be The Next In Line’ (2000 ‘Feel Good Hit of the Summer’ single) and ‘Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy’ (2002 ‘Songs For The Deaf’ album) and this may be surprising considering the band’s hard rocking sound which has been described as about everything, from heavy metal, to psychedelic rock, desert rock, stoner rock… quite different from the British invasion? But the Kinks were the first punk/garage rock band and Ray Davies has played with Metallica since, so? But I feel utterly stupid because it took me a while to realize there weren’t some other Queens of The Stone Age songs.
‘Outlaw Blues’ is a great cover of Bob Dylan they did for the 2012 ‘Chimes of Freedom: Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International’. It’s a blues turned more metallic, a very bold and sexy version, however close to the original minus Dylan’s nasal tone.
‘Goin’ Out West’ (2007 ‘Sick, Sick, Sick’ EP) is a Tom Waits’ cover, and it’s thunderous and dangerous as any Tom Waits’ song should be. The song is a fast road trip on a sludgy bumpy road and it’s awesome to see two mega stars of my constellation (and I know it’s not a private one) collapsing into each other like this.
Following the same idea, they also covered Elliott Smith’s ‘Christian Brothers’ (2007 ‘Sick, Sick, Sick’ EP), and people can find it really surprising, in the sense how can the king of badass rock, the heavy metal guy Josh Homme sing a song by the king of shy acoustic, the gentle music guy Elliott Smith?… but it fits perfectly, this is after all a ‘fuck you’ song with lines like ‘No bad dream fucker’s gonna boss me around’, ‘And you think I ought to shake your motherfucking hand’, ‘Nightmares become me it’s so fucking clear’! And Homme’s falsetto has never sounded better when he sings ‘it’s sick what I want’.
QOSTA have also covered Billy Idol’s ‘White Wedding’, Brian Eno’s Needles in the Camel’s Eye’, ‘Roky Erickson and the Aliens’ ‘Bloody Hammer’, The Subhumans’ ‘Wake Up Screaming’, Romeo Void’s ‘Never Say Never’, Kyuss’ ‘Thumb’ and ‘Blues for the red Sun’, ZZTop’s Precious and Grace’ and Turbonegro’s ‘Back to Dungaree High’, and may be others!