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Sam and I went to see Queens of the Stone Age at Climate Pledge Arena on Oct 4th.
QOTSA is an alternative rock band that I would say came out of the grunge movement of the early 90’s. Josh Homme is the guiding force behind the band. Josh had previously been in the band Screaming Trees for a time. If you consider Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden to be the grunge headliners there were many smaller bands also involved in the grunge movement and Screaming Trees was one of the bands who were right behind the headliners. Josh became friends with many of these people, including Dave Grohl from Nirvana and Mark Lanegan from Screaming Trees and the QOTSA has always been a bit of a revolving door with many collaborators coming and going. Behind all of it is Josh though and he has his own musical style.
Although QOTSA is primarily driven by guitars they differ from the other bands mentioned in that Josh uses a lot of different timing signatures and guitar scales in his songs. Songs might have notes played off-beat with dramatic pauses where the song stops and restarts. Josh has said that he sees much of the music being “rock versions of electronic music”.
Regardless, it was a great concert. It’s funny how much we’ve come to expect fantastic light shows and visual graphics at big concerts now. Compared to some other concerts I’d say the light show was fairly basic but taken by itself it’s amazing what they can do with lights now and ten years ago I probably would have said that the light show was incredible. Sometimes the visual aspect of a show can almost overshadow the music. I think QOTSA balanced that nicely and the music was the focus, as it should be.
There were two openers, neither of which I cared for but to each his own.
