Them Crooked Vultures - Them Crooked Vultures
Messy first outing for the hard-rocking supergroup
A funny quirk of Dave Grohl's 'legendary drummer' reputation is that it's largely predicated on the fact that he doesn't actually do very much drumming these days, preferring to busy himself with the Foo Fighters' ever more pointless AOR, and probably stuff like going to hog roasts with Jack Black. When he does drum, there is an unspoken belief amidst the indie-rock community that something astonishing is likely to happen, the percussive equivalent of a total eclipse, or that trick that guy on The Paul Daniels Show did where he got shot in the face and didn't die. Thus expectations are inevitably - if somewhat irrationally - raised for Them Crooked Vultures, a knockabout group consisting of Grohl, John Paul 'The least famous one from Led Zeppelin' Jones, and actual, bona fide, still-viable writing talent Josh Homme, of Queens of the Stone age fame. What their self-titled debut album actually sounds like is... a Josh Homme record with some other guys tagging along, occasionally cramping his style. Weirdy riff rock that constantly mires itself in technically adept but oft deadly-dull grooves, Them Crooked Vultures nonetheless has a sinister, off kilter swagger to it that reminds you of just what a fruitloop genius Homme really is. Nonetheless, the best bits of the record are so absurdly saturated in his influence - the deeply creepy 'Reptiles' and 'Interlude with Ludes', the coruscatingly non-classic rock QUOTA guitars on 'Spinning In Daffodils' - that you kind of wonder what the vision behind this band was, if any. We've been sold three geniuses, but this box only appears to contain the one, diluted.
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