After the sun set, the acts got harder and the bands got louder. “Look at that fuckin’ moon,” guitarist Josh Homme said shortly after taking the stage with Them Crooked Vultures. This two-month old band has only a handful of shows under its studded leather belt, but the word supergroup isn’t strong enough to describe them. Even super-fuckin’-group doesn’t do them justice, since in addition to vocals from Queens of the Stone Age frontman Homme, they also have Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters) on drums, and playing bass is John Paul Jones from a little band called Led Zeppelin. Read that sentence again. Queens of the Stone Age. Nirvana. Zep. It’s like the t-shirt department at Hot Topic formed a band and decided to rock the flesh off your face in the process.
They blasted their way through new songs “Scumbag Blues” and “Mind Eraser”, both which were like a swift kick to the central nervous system. Describing their sound is like writing ad copy for power tools: It’s hard. It’s precise. And it has the potential to cause bodily injury.
Their performance drew heavily from the riff-heavy rock of Queens of the Stone Age but—unsurprisingly—when Jones took to the keyboard, they spiraled into some Zep-style blues.
My recap of the first day of the festival was posted at BitchBuzz yesterday. I’m gonna get to work on Day Two after I consume an arrythmia-inducing amount of caffeine.
