Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris (2007), 7/10

Era Vulgaris is a relatively hated album for changing the Queens of the Stone Age rock formula and experimenting in ways most find either too new or bafflingly dull. While the record is not for everyone, it is a breath of fresh air after the monotonous Lullabies to Paralyze. If there exists a more Josh Homme composition than "I'm Designer" with its desert guitar licks and ironic lyrics, we haven not heard it, and while it is not the greatest from an aesthetic standpoint, the track communicates a specific feeling very successfully, as does the majority of the album. Equally, "3's & 7's" exists as one of the band's strongest songs bar found in any of their recordings. We also get the drugged "Suture Up Your Future" just before going on another droning trip on "River in the Road" and closing with the brilliantly unsettling "Run, Pig, Run". The unfortunate missing title track in the North American release featuring Trent Reznor takes the album's value down a peg in comparison to the Deutschland Tour Edition, but the much more widely accessible release is strong enough to retain worthy praise. Admittedly, the album is held back by a jagged set of motifs that don’t always come together to claim much of anything, other than providing very separate, individually pleasing songs. The clever wordplay sometimes lands to full effect and sometimes drags on, but works more often than it meanders into meaninglessness. The album encapsulates Homme’s individual eccentricities better than any other QOTSA album, leaning into his individual creativity and relying on the band to fill in the foundational gaps with tight performances, which it achieves successfully. Some tracks such as “Into the Hollow” feel like a regression that does not fit amongst the wider psychedelic progressiveness seen on others, like the opener or “Misfit Love”, or the wonderous and instrumentally grandiose yet lyrically intimate “Suture Up Your Future”. Another showcase of the band’s idiosyncratic strengths in drug-induced desert sounds comes just in time for a strong closing with “Run, Pig, Run”. Not quite as consistent as their best work, but one of their strongest efforts in experimentation and examining the wondrously surreal world of psychotropics.