Them Crooked Vultures - Them Crooked Vultures
On November 13, 2009, "Them Crooked Vultures", the debut and only studio album by the band "Them Crooked Vultures", was released.
In the history of rock and roll, the term supergroup has often aroused justifiable suspicion. Too often, it is a summit meeting full of ego and PR that yields a polite, cautious and unenthusiastic result, one in which the whole is less than the sum of its glorious parts. But when Josh Homme, lead singer, guitarist and the mastermind behind Queens of the Stone Age and stoner-rock pioneers Kyuss, teamed up with Dave Grohl, the man who powered Nirvana's rhythmic engine and became the leader of the stadium powerhouse Foo Fighters, and John Paul Jones, the bassist, keyboardist and brilliant arranger of Led Zeppelin, the result was quite the opposite. These three musicians did not come together to bask in past glory or deliver a predictable nostalgic product, but to create a hungry, dangerous and unpredictable three-headed monster that sounded like a young underground band playing as if its life depended on every note.
The seeds of the project were sown as early as 2005, when Grohl guested with Jones on the Foo Fighters' double album "In Your Honor," and the two later shared the stage at the 2008 Grammy Awards. Grohl, who had dreamed for years of returning to the full-time drumming position alongside his longtime friend Homme, with whom he recorded the masterpiece "Songs for the Deaf," decided to initiate a summit meeting in the most original and bizarre way imaginable. In January 2009, Grohl celebrated his 40th birthday at the medieval-themed restaurant in California, and deliberately seated Homme and Jones next to each other at the table. While armored knights fought on horseback in the background and guests ate roast chicken with their hands and wore cardboard crowns on their heads, the two discovered an immediate common language, a dry sense of humor, and a shared passion for music that goes beyond the boundaries of the familiar and safe.
The day after that illusory evening, the three of them showed up at Homme's Pink Duck Studios in Burbank, California, to play together for the first time without any expectations or contracts. The chemistry in the room was immediate and electric, and within the first few minutes of improvisation, the central riff in seven-eighths time that would later become the song "New Fang" began to take shape. With a conscious decision to maintain complete secrecy to avoid leaks, media pressure, or constant comparisons to their parent bands, the three worked for months under the radar at Homme's studio and at Chalice Studios in Hollywood, with the esteemed producer and engineer Alan Moulder and musician and close friend Alain Johannes, who later also became the fourth member of the band in live performances, recording and mixing alongside them. Initially, the three considered calling the band "Caligula," after the mad Roman emperor, but after discovering that the name was already taken, Homme came up with the name "Them Crooked Vultures", which perfectly described the trio's predatory, crooked, and dark spirit.
The band's debut took place on August 9, 2009, at Chicago's intimate Metro to a stunned audience that had discovered their existence just hours before the doors opened, and immediately after, the band embarked on a surprise tour of festivals in Europe and the UK before fans had even heard a single recorded note. The meeting of three generations of rock royalty created a rare synergy in the studio, with each participant pushing their friends to the limit. Homme brought the hypnotic desert groove, the exotic scales and the cynical, razor-sharp lyrics, Grohl provided beastly, heavy and merciless drumming that reminded the world why he is considered one of the greatest drummers of his generation, and the sixty-three-year-old Jones emerged as the album's true secret weapon, switching with virtuoso control between multi-string bass guitars, a clavinet, piano, electric mandolin, a musical saw and even a rare vintage Optigan organ from the early 1970s.
(Photo: Timster)
The album opens with a crushing statement of intent with "No One Loves Me & Neither Do I", a track that opens with Homme's almost bare, bluesy vocals over a slide guitar and measured drums, before developing into a sophisticated, rough funky groove that matches the spirit of "Trampled Under Foot." But in the second half of the song, one of the defining moments of the entire album occurs, when Grohl's formidable drumming drops the listener into a monolithic, slow, crushing riff that drags across the floor with the weight of tons, combining the primal power of 1970s heavy rock with modern stoner rock.
It's immediately followed by "Mind Eraser, No Chaser", one of the album's catchiest and most energetic songs, where Homme and Grohl share vocal duties in perfect dynamics over a bouncy, addictive guitar riff. The lead single "New Fang" continues the momentum with a sweeping, restless groove, where Jones' nimble bass and Homme's sharp guitar lead a relentless chase over a disjointed, adrenaline-fueled Bo-Diddley beat. The song earned the trio a 2011 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance, and proved how their music manages to be rhythmically complex yet still immediate and immersive.
The rapid momentum continues into "Dead End Friends", a tight, dark, and sharp song that relies on Jones' melodic, driving bass work and mesmerizing vocal harmonies, leading to one of the album's most ambitious and impressive peaks, "Elephants." For nearly seven minutes, the band takes the listener on a rollercoaster ride that opens with a particularly stormy and fast-paced riff inspired by Eastern European and Gypsy melodies, before abruptly plunging into a slow, heavy, and winding groove that sounds like an elephant march in the heart of the desert, as Jones and Homme weave together layers of seismically powerful guitars and bass.
The trio's bluesy, psychedelic side finds spectacular expression on the sixth track, "Scumbag Blues." It's a dark, smoky funk-blues piece where Jones' clavinet, which at its best recalls his classic work with "Led Zeppelin" and Stevie Wonder, leads the song alongside a pulsing bass and Homme's acid guitar solo. It's followed by "Bandoliers," one of the album's most melodic, contemplative, and exposed songs, where Homme's soft, vulnerable falsetto vocals float over a swaying rhythm and wailing guitars that create a cinematic atmosphere of a dark western at dusk.
In the second part of the album, the band allows themselves to go wild and delve even deeper into the realms of experimentation and avant-garde. The song "Reptiles" combines angular, fragmented riffs with a claustrophobic and predatory atmosphere, and leads directly into "Interlude with Ludes", a hallucinatory, slow, and psychedelic vapor-filled interlude that relies on the nostalgic, distorted sound of Jones' Optigan organ, which built the track around loops of old optical CDs while Homme sings in a hazy, bewitched voice as if from a cabaret nightmare.
This experimentalism flows into the album's longest and most complex epic, "Warsaw or the First Breath You Take After You Give Up", a nearly eight-minute piece that opens with a fast and aggressive punk-rock attack before breaking down into a psychedelic, dark and hypnotic jam in which the three musicians stretch the boundaries of their group improvisation with telepathic control. It is followed by the twisted and cabaret-like "Caligulove" and the song "Gunman", with its desert and driving disco-rock rhythm, bring the rhythmic energy back to the forefront, before the album closes with the masterpiece "Spinning in Daffodils". The seven-and-a-half-minute closing track opens with Jones' enigmatic and dark piano playing, and gradually develops into an epic, mesmerizing and majestic rock song that leaves the listener breathless.
Upon its release, the album was critically acclaimed worldwide, peaking at number 12 on the US Billboard charts and number 4 on the Rock Albums chart, achieving gold status in the UK, Australia and New Zealand and platinum in Canada. Beyond the numbers, "Them Crooked Vultures" remains to this day one of the rarest and most brilliant examples in rock history of a supergroup that managed to surpass the imaginary expectations that were placed on it. Despite exciting one-off reunions, such as the one that took place at the tribute show for the late drummer Taylor Hawkins in 2022, the album remains a one-off and unreconstructed brilliance, a monolith of pure, dangerous and uncompromising rock and roll that captured three giants in a moment of complete creative freedom.
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