11
NEWS
MUSIC
M
ark Ronson is synonymous
with the dance and pop
goliaths of the music industry.
But while churning up some
seriously propulsive, rockabilly
stylings on new album
Villains
,
Queens Of The Stone Age
decided the British producer was
just the ticket. “He’s got anger
issues,” Dean Fertita chuckles.
“No, he’s a sweetheart, he’s
very easy to work with. We’ve
kind of brushed paths over the
years, and I’ve always liked him,
so to have an opportunity to
work with him was really cool.
And going into it, I think from
an outside perspective, we
both had something to lose, or
risk. We knew there was a little
gamble there for both of us. But
it made for a really exciting work
environment, it really did.”
Across its no-space-wasted
nine tracks,
Villains
includes
jousting melodic guitar lines, a
Cake-like cheekiness in some
of Michael Schuman’s agile
basswork, a voodoo blues feel
to frontman Josh Homme’s
vocals (finishing a phrase by
flinging his voice up to a high,
vibrating “ooh”) and a special
approach to time signatures.
Stand-out
Domesticated Animals
constantly (and randomly) rotates
INTERVIEW
Amid the band's Splendour sideshows, we sat down with Queens Of The
Stone Age's Dean Fertita (keys, guitar, percussion) to talk new album
Villains
.
are grouped into a certain era that matches a
time in my life. A lot of these recordings were
made in Hawaii, and Florida and Califonia. The
album has a very coastal feeling to me.
There’s a honking sound on
Melody Unfair
which could be a goose and it could be
your heel rubbing against the bottom of the
bathtub or it could be electronic. Is there
deliberate ambiguity in these sounds?
It's always a challenge to make certain
sounds feel organic and not too mechanical. I
feel like it has as much to do with the sounds
as how they are worked into, and groove
with, the other instruments. I’ve always liked
acoustic sounds that sound electronic. The
majority of the instruments on the record are
acoustic so I think I was definitely going for
that ambiguity, yeah.
What made you move from the boingy jaw
harp into the very contemplative acoustic
guitar drone halfway through
DR
aw one for J
?
I kind of view this record as
my attempt at making some sort
of personal Americana or even
world folk lore music, and yet
also documenting emotions and
circumstances in my life. I associate
the jaw harp and similar sounds with
American folk music and African folk
music. I wanted the record to feel like a collage
of those elements. The drone part of the song
is a spiritual hymn of sorts. It’s dedicated to
Dylan Rieder and my aunt Jackie Baetz, hence
their initials DR and J being a part of the title.
They both passed away last year unfortunately.
Do the two
Lunch
(es)
Out Of Order
have any reference to Burroughs’
Naked Lunch
?
No but it’s interesting that you
mention Burroughs because I am very
interested in his tape recorder and
cut and paste techniques. You could
say there is a bit of that in this record.
ZKR
between three or four beats
per bar – just when you think
you’ve got it, they’ll pound into
a chorus a beat early. “There’s a
lot of that – Josh calls it ‘orbital’
song arrangements, where it’s
always turning and changing
just a little bit as the song goes
on,” Fertita explains. “We didn’t
sit down and say ‘Let’s do a
weird time signature’, we just
played and thought ‘That sounds
interesting, what if it does this
here?’” And do they chart it?
No, they do not. “We don’t write
stuff down, we kind of just yell it
out,” Fertita smiles. “A lot of eye
communication, you know?”
There are some unexpected
and subtle crumbs of brass,
auxiliary percussion and other
atmospheric knickknacks (see:
the rapid in-and-out breathing
on
Head Like A Haunted
House
, recalling the awesome
Speaking In Tongues
by Homme’s
secondary band Eagles Of Death
Metal) and without drawing
aside the curtain, Fertita says
it’s important to the band to set
the scene with those
elements. “It’s another
thing Mark’s great at –
the devil’s in the details,
right?" he asks. "So you
can go and listen back to a
lot of this, and pick up new
things. For me, that was
always my favourite part
about listening to records
– discovering stuff.”
ZKR
Eucalyptus
by Avey Tare
is out now via
Domino.
Read the full interview online at
stack.com.au...it’s always
turning and
changing just a
little bit as the
song goes on
Villains
by
Queens Of The
Stone Age is
out Aug 25 via
Remote Control.
QUEENS OF THE
STONE AGE
st154_091-090_MUSIC Room 4-5.indd 2
24/7/17 3:02 pm