Review | Demon Rocker of State Street

A funny thing happened on my way through the extra-special Queens of the Stone Age (QOTSA) show at the Arlington Theatre. Charismatic and darkly wry lead singer Josh Homme, who spent a fair amount of time singing while wandering through the aisles, passed by, and I couldn’t resist snapping a photo. Without skipping a lyric, he grabbed my phone, gazed at it, then rubbed his crotch with the thing. The shred of decency in him inspired him to hand it back.

I’ll never wash my phone again. Then again, I never wash my phone.

His audience-interruptus antics continued. When an excited fan held out his hand for a shake, Homme instead knocked him upside the head, and vigorously grabbed him by the hair and gave a different kind of shake. Was Homme making a statement about the downsides of phone-ready and overly friendly modern concertgoers? No, he was playing a role suited to this unique, chamber-esque QOTSA on this limited Catacombs Tour, the role of a snarky, dusky crooner in a black suit, flown in from the Brecht/Weill demimonde model.

Needless to say, this was not your run-of-the-mill encounter with the band. We’ve seen QOTSA blasting forth their neo-Cream-y, eloquent alternative rock at the Santa Barbara Bowl before — and a fair portion of that identity made up part of the Arlington show. But this was mostly a fresh vision of the band, slathered in extra special sauce.

The so-named “Catacombs Tour” — referencing their show in the Paris Catacombs, producing a live recording — is a limited edition and site-specific venture, with stops in only historic theaters in Europe and the U.S. Our treasured Arlington Theatre is on a list including NYC’s Beacon Theater, San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, and Toronto’s Massey Hall. Diehard fans with money to spare and insider ticket connections can still catch the special show at the Bass Concert Hall in Austin Texas (November 19) and the Saenger Theater in New Orleans on November 21.

In a program broken up into three acts, the conceptual concert opened in chamber rock fashion, with newly arranged versions of songs featuring a string quartet, subtle keyboards, and spare percussion versus a standard bashing drum kit effect. A dim-lit, dark horse cabaret atmosphere prevailed in the house, with Homme introducing the evening by slinking down the aisle while easing into a medley of “Running Joke” and “Paper Machete.” He took on the persona of a Weill-ish, Weimar Republic–an character, or something out of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, even wielding a menacing meat cleaver as a prop. Yes, he was the demon troubadour of State Street.

Act II ushered in a slightly more modern sound, with synths and expanded percussion in the mix, kicking open with a medley of “Someone’s in the Wolf,” “A Song for the Deaf,” and “Straight Jacket Fitting Mosquito Song” (those song titles hint at the dark humor gene in this band’s songbook). Finally, the familiar drums-and-guitars persona hit the stage with due velocity, opening with “You Got a Killer Scene There, Man …” and closing with “… Like Clockwork.”

In this special setting, they dodged the obvious greatest hits, “No One Knows,” and “Go with the Flow,” and slithered through a range of songs old and new from over the band’s quarter century life. They took a brief detour from original material to serve up “Spinning in Daffodils,” originally by Them Crooked Vultures. Right hand harmonizing ally, the strong-voiced Mikey Shuman, seized the vocalist spotlight on auto pilot. 

Let us now praise our glorious and loveably kitschy Arlington Theatre, a peripheral star of this show. At mid-show, Homme dropped his sinister suave-ster act and got a bit emotional, explaining how he fell in love with the movie palaces of old as a kid growing up in the Palm Desert area. He only discovered the historic 1934-vintage Arlington in recent years, and immediately fell in love with it, making it a shoe-in for the “Catacombs Tour.”

This was one of those host venue-loving and specifically acknowledging evenings at the Arlington, another one being Eddie Vedder’s solo show, in which he started by playing an upright piano in the stage-adjacent balcony, and then came down a rope to hit the stage,

In a more general commentary on the idea of the Catacombs Tour, Homme praised the Arlington and the vintage theaters on this tour, as portals serving as “made-up worlds, a threshold to something beautiful.” As this unique QOTSA experience eased to a relatively graceful close with an encore of “Long Slow Goodbye,” their own made-up world felt compelling in a whole new way. It felt like a trip to other new dimensions for a veteran rock band unwilling to merely show up for the gig in the same old clothes.