I belong to a small and misunderstood subset of rock fans who actually prefer Eagles of Death Metal to Queens of the Stone Age. (I mean, it's not like we've had any meetings or anything, so it's possible I might be the only one.) I dig Queens and the manfully cool bulldozing thing they do, it's just that I find Josh Homme's side gig with Jesse Hughes offers more of the stuff I crave from my rock-- sex, humor, fun.
I know Eagles are far more derivative than Queens, but they steal from the best and have a great time doing it. So many new groups are so damn serious and reverent about stealing from post-punk or Neil Young or Bob Dylan that it's refreshing to see a couple of guys swipe from the Rolling Stones, New York Dolls, and Led Zeppelin and not give a shit about piety. Their newest record, Heart On, delivers more of the same, though that's hardly a pejorative when more of the same means being tighter than Cindy McCain's smile.
To be fair, Heart On does reveal a slightly maturing sense of pop songcraft from Hughes and Homme: the disarming loveliness of "Now I'm a Fool" is equivalent to those pop-tinged weepers (like "Questioningly" or "Needles and Pins") that the Ramones used to toss out to catch you off guard. As its title windily suggests, "How Can a Man With So Many Friends Feel So Alone" also bears a somewhat melancholy cast, even as the guitars quote Messrs. Page and Richards at their cockiest. Another influence poking through the song is mid-to-late-90s Beck, back when the stereopathic Scientologist was expertly fusing country, blues, and funk to his own cracked-glass worldview. In fact, the wisecracking sex jams of 1999's Midnite Vultures serve as a pretty good reference point for several of the decidedly non-serious scuzz-rockers here, especially "High Voltage", with its invocations of "getting freaky in the shadows of the night time."
Of course, whereas Beck preferred cobbling together his surrealistic quips from pop-culture allusions, Eagles of Death Metal have seemingly never met a dumb pun or double entendre they could resist (in case the album title didn't tip you off). But rather than coming off as smarmily ironic or just plain braindead, the cheap jokes align nicely with the band's entire cheeseball fuck-mook shtick. The James Brown homage "(I Used to Couldn't Dance) Tight Pants" and modestly punny "Cheap Thrills" (complete with bored female vocals and references to "spending" time) are fine, but neither compares to the retarded majesty of "Solo Flights". Rock's annals are rife with infamous odes to whacking off, but few have ever been as gleefully pleased with it as this one, thanks to assertions like "nobody does me like I do." To be honest, it's not a bad metaphor for the entire project, which amounts to an exercise in self-gratification that's nonetheless thoroughly entertaining for how much care and enjoyment is put into the act.
