Late in Queens of the Stone Age‘s strange and wonderful night in Hollywood on Tuesday, singer Josh Homme paused to state the obvious.
“I know it’s all a bit strange and unusual, and a little terrifying,” Homme said of a performance that deconstructed the band’s catalog to reinvent them in unprecedented new arrangements. “Hasn’t been an easy time.
“Well, tough (bleep), Larry, life is scary,” he continued to laughter from the sold-out Dolby Theatre. “That’s the point.
“It’s OK to make strange requests of each other. We’re making a strange request of you tonight, and we’re asking a lot of you.”
And how could anyone complain about that, really, given a performance in which Queens set aside their usual hard-rocking ways for much of the night to do something equally beautiful yet entirely different, too?
The Catacombs Tour was inspired by this unexpected fact: On July 8, 2024, Queens of the Stone Age became the first musical act to perform inside the Catacombs of Paris, legally, at least. “Alive in the Catacombs,” a concert film and EP, arrived earlier this year.
Inspired by that unusual performance amid the ancient stacks of skulls and bones, Queens of the Stone Age designed its tour around the sounds they heard there: Half the night was mostly acoustic, while the violins and cello they added for the Catacombs performance are now supplemented by a four-piece brass section.
So sure, it’s a strange request, but for 17 songs over two hours on Tuesday, it was embraced like old friends, the band and their fans, greeting each other with a hug.
A few minutes of ambient sound – crickets, birdsong, the groaning of industrial machinery, and finally the slow tolling of a church bell – led to the opening mashup of “Running Joke” and “Paper Machete,” Homme singing the opening lines a cappella before members of the band stepped one by one from behind the stage curtain to join in.
Act I of four delivered the five songs of “Alive in the Catacombs” in order, each of them adding different textures of sound to a stage lit in soft blue spotlights – and the ever-moving glare of the caged lightbulb at the end of the long utility light cord Homme carried.
“Kalopsia” opened with xylophone plinks accompanied by the plucked strings of two violins and a cello. A somber “Villains of Circumstance” arrived like a sorrowful song in the saddest cafe in Paris.
The strings slipped away as fans cheered the opening of “Suture Up Your Future,” which rocked harder while still primarily acoustic. “I Never Came” closed out the Catacombs act. [The Criterion Channel is the streaming home of the short film of that performance if you’re interested.]
Act II shifted into a bigger sound as the stage curtain rose to reveal a chamber orchestra with four musicians on strings, four more on brass – “bows and blows,” as Homme would later thank them during introductions.
Homme roamed into the seats and aisles of the front section of the theater often, sometimes with a microphone in one hand, a butcher’s meat cleaver in the other, for some unspoken reason. Just about when you were sure it was a prop – he dropped it while flipping it in the air several times, and waved it nervously close to a fan or two – he flung it at the stage where it stuck into the floor with a solid thunk.
A medley of “Someone’s in the Wolf / A Song for the Deaf / Straight Jacket Fitting” opened this part of the show, running perhaps 15 minutes long. The glorious racket of violins over tuba and trombone summoned ghosts of a German expressionist cabaret, the stage drenched in the glow of red lights.
“It’s funny dressing up,” Homme said at its close, acknowledging the band’s request that fans come dressed for the kinds of highbrow productions the smaller theaters on this tour typically present. “Why do we gotta dress up? I’ll tell you why. It’s a way of saying I love you.”
Then, a moment later, perhaps considering the sharp maroon suit he was wearing, he added this: “You don’t have to say ‘I love you.’ Sometimes I just have nice pants on.”
The set often dipped deep into Queens of the Stone Age‘s back catalogue. Given the need to strip the songs for parts to be divvied up between the unusual mix of 14 musicians on stage, it surely eliminated some of the band’s bigger hits.
So fans got tunes that in many cases hadn’t been played live for a decade or more, or in some cases hardly ever. “Mosquito Song,” for instance, had only been played six times before this tour. “Spinning in Daffodils,” a cover of a song by Them Crooked Vultures,” a side project of Homme’s with Foo Fighter Dave Grohl and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, showed up in a Queens set for the first time on the tour.
“‘You Got a Killer Scene There, Man …’,” which opened Act III, had only been played a handful of times before this fall. “Hideaway” had only been done once.
The third act featured much more of the expected sound of the band – guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen switched to an electric instrument here, as did bassist Michael Shuman, while drummer Jon Theodore and keyboardist Dean Fertita pounded harder and played louder.
“The Vampyre of Time and Memory” saw Homme singing its lovely melody while accompanying himself on piano. “Auto Pilot” gave Shuman a chance to sing lead vocals before Homme joined in on harmonies.
Near the end of the main set, a strong new song, “Easy Street,” which the band premiered live on this tour, arrived. It turned down the volume a little bit to let the melody and handclaps of the entire band shine through.
“… Like Clockwork” closed the final act with Homme singing a sweet falsetto over the strings and horns before Van Leeuwen and Fertita joined in, and then, the volume rising louder and louder, Theodore and Shuman.
The shows on this tour have all ended with “Long Slow Goodbye,” which at the Dolby opened with Homme riffing with the crowd on life and death and the ever-present closeness of friends and loved ones on the other side of the eternal veil. Eventually, he started to sing, unaccompanied, urging the audience to join him as he did.
“I close my eyes, I just can’t sleep,” he sang, now with Shuman adding harmonies. “Where have you gone again, my sweet?
“On a long slow goodbye. On a long slow goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.”
Paris Jackson, yes, the late Michael Jackson‘s daughter, opened the show with a set of new singer-songwriter tunes for which she accompanied herself solo on acoustic guitar. It’s a new sound, her old rock persona shed somewhere in the past.
The songs were appealing, her banter between them quite funny. An album she’s been working on with songwriter-producer Linda Perry is set for release next year, she noted.