Homme rocks Township shortly after getting cut-off at awards show
Less than a week after his Grammy performance was cut off by a Delta Airlines commercial, lead singer Josh Hommes took the stage at the Township Auditorium with Queens of the Stone Age for a powerful, gritty, emotional and — most importantly — uninterrupted display of veteran rocksmanship.
Hommes has been quiet about the Grammy debacle, but the frontman was clearly upset about it at his Friday night show. You could feel him seeing red as the band hammered out one combative song after another with little to no rest in between. Save for a few thanks, Hommes barely stopped to speak to the audience.
“I know you’re supposed to talk during these things … but this is one of those nights I just wanna play, you know?” he said.
The crowd responded with a raucous and heartfelt “F—- the Grammys!”
Fans were mad at the awards show for more than just the disrespectful interruption, however. Queens of the Stone Age were passed over for two awards that night, including best rock performance, which went — to the dismay of any hard rock die-hard — to Imagine Dragons.
The mutually-felt Grammy hate coupled with an already-intense setlist created a perfect storm of aggression.
It was everything you could ask for in a hard rock show: a royally pissed-off vocalist, thrashing guitar solos and an LED screen lighting up a backdrop of rivers of blood, malformed skulls gnashing their teeth and silhouettes of naked women dancing.
The rapid-strumming intros shot each song off like a machine gun, cooled down with Hommes’ nonchalant vocals and penetrated with Queens’ signature guitar moans, which were achieved by dragging the strings across a microphone or with a table steel guitar (a dorky-looking Beach Boys instrument, but one lead guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen made look cool by spitting on the ground a lot).
The setlist covered much of the album “…Like Clockwork,” which was released last year, but they were sure to throw in a few classic fan favorites, too. “No One Knows,” “Little Sister” and “Go with the Flow” were all included, but sadly, “3’s & 7’s” was not.
The fast-paced show slowed down only twice.
First, about halfway through “…Like Clockwork,” the lingering bitterness from the Grammys made the disappointment that seeps through the album’s lyrics that much more real. Take, for example, the line, “Because not everything that goes around comes back around you know.” Then, at the beginning of the encore, Hommes sat at a piano for the contemplating, depressive “The Vampyre of Time and Memory.”
The audience was made up of a blend of college prep and college dropout goth, which made for one unsung highlight: a woman in all black with fishnets and whiteout makeup slow-grinding on a man with a polo tucked into khakis.
There was something poetic about the moment — two opposite souls coming together to revel in their disgust for the mistreatment of modern rock.