Stay Positive Sunday

Keeping it with the positive jams.

A sommelier can, from a single sip of wine, tell you where the grapes were grown.  Not just a general idea, but often a specific vineyard, and, with some potentially dubious cases, the exact location within that vineyard.  The wine is truly a product of its birthplace, and it carries within itself the qualities of that place, a marker of the place of time from which it sprung.  

In the same way, I think, certain musicians carry markers of where they're from - not necessarily their place of birth, but where the grew up, and where they truly found their home.

Josh Homme sounds like Southern California.  To be fair, it's a sound that the prolific frontman of Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age actively cultivates.  He's a native son of Palm Desert, California, and it's clear from his body of work that the entire mythos of the desert is extremely important to him.  If nothing else, he's one of the progenitors of 'Desert Rock' as a genre, and the latest Queens album, ...Like Clockwork, feels like it was born in a deserted place, the product of vast, empty landscapes where life is hard and just trudging on is the greatest struggle a man can face.

But you'll notice I didn't say Josh Homme sounds like the desert.  While he captures the desolate headspaces, blistering heat, and ultimate freedom that the deserts of Southern California have come to represent better than anyone around, he's also a damn fine example of what can only be defined as Los Angeles rock. It's an odd genre, one that probably only exists in my head, but there's just a sound out there that drips with the slick, produced, and above all catchy style that can only be described as LA.  And make no mistake, these songs rock - they just feel a bit dirty while they do it.  The fact of the matter is, for all his Desert Sessions, Josh Homme is a damn good LA musician, and he's got the dirty cuts to prove it.

It's present on a couple of Queens of the Stone Age albums, but it truly shines through with his work as The Eagles of Death Metal, whose name, if nothing else, reeks of an LA-esque irony, a winking nod to the business's history that's born from the same pop-culture driven brainspace that sends people crawling after addresses on Sunset Boulevard.  The song that's been bouncing around my head this week, Solid Gold, is an Eagles of Death Metal track, and it's quite possibly the most LA thing I've heard.  Don't get me wrong, I love it; it's got a catchy hook that will stick with you all day, and it seems tailor made for summer party jams - or at least classic rock-minded ones.  But that's just it: the entire thing has a 'fresh off the party' feel that seems quintessentially Los Angeles.  It feels born of excess; fast cars, hard drugs, and great sex.  Mind you, that's just rock and roll, but it's packaged so slickly that I can't see it coming from anywhere other than Southern California.

Again, being LA isn't a strike against Josh Homme - if anything I think it completes him as a musician.  I love Kyuss and The Desert Sessions, but if that's all he had, the man would be pretentious in the extreme.  It's that commercial sensibility, that slick pop rock LA style, that balances him out, and gave birth to masterpieces like Songs For the Deaf.  And it's what allows him to be truly representative of Southern California as a whole - not just one town and one niche genre, but a whole massive subculture, with all the twists, turns, and contradictions that implies.