Queens of the Stone Age, Live at the Middle East Upstairs, Boston Jan 21st

Those of us with a taste for the low end, for a guitar-tone so deep, solid, and unremitting it seems to produce an answering drone in the blocked precincts of the skull, a radioactive groan like a bar of plutonium inserted into the middle of the brain, will always cherish the memory of Kyuss. Their quintessence: the album Sky Valley (Elektra, 1994). Play it once and you get bottom-heavy biker rock with dirt-loving guitars and a frontman terminally damaged by the example of Ian Astbury; play it twice and your ears open. The music rings, booms, rolls outward in a weather of disturbance, not to be taken lightly.

Kyuss came from the desert-from Coachella Valley, California-and when not schooling themselves in the gentle hooliganisms of frog fights and gecko-chasing they would play generator-powered outdoor shows off the back of flatbed trucks. The desert surrounded their music, the desert prickled it with stars, the desert crawled genie-like into their bongs, baked them, went up their noses in a spindrift of millennial dust and thus was born the Kyuss sound-a distant, illimitable rumble with blown minds dancing along its horizon. After the Meat Puppets, they are the second great sun-fried and sonically-affected desert band of our time. The drums are mixed low, right into the gut of the music; the guitars are space-dazed, massively defocussed; and under it all, way under, a thin ribbon of fury from the throat of John Garcia. "When it comes to my past life and what I have been through," he told Metal Hammer, "it has no real influence on the music I write. Me being hit in the fucking mouth with a red steel grip fucking work boot and going to the hospital for reconstructive surgery or my dad beating the shit out of me has no influence on me or my music whatsoever."

Now I never caught Kyuss live, so when Queens of the Stone Age roll into Boston I'm on the spot, sweatily gripping my pre-purchased ticket. This trio, after all, is hundred-proof ex-Kyuss-each member was in at least one incarnation of the band, and singer/guitarist Josh Homme was in all of them. The Middle East is packed, the hype is up, and local support Roadsaw (Kyuss zealots all) are inspired to kick out the best set of rockin' slobber I've yet seen from them. The Queens, by contrast, never fully materialize; they come onstage to billows of dry ice and two strobes maniacally fluttering, fully cloaked in a psychedelic smog from which the occasional elbow, forehead, or tuning-peg will briefly emerge like an amnesiac's efforts at memory. So far, so Kyuss-but when the band start cranking, the tremendous ozone of heaviness that should accompany such a display is, er, missed. For one thing, they're waging a war with the PA: There are falling dustbin lids in the upper range of the guitar, and Alfredo Hernandez's bass drum, crucial punctuation, is inexplicably suppressed.

More to the point, this is-of course-a different band: Queens' songs do not attempt the rumble and spread of Kyuss, they are hookier, and more compressed, with vicious little kicks of melody and enough hard-nosed wit to rhyme "ephedrine" with "where the hell you been." Josh Homme's doleful voice hovers spectrally over the riffs, full of suggestion-"you've got to open up your wrists / and let it go... ," could that be a line? Yep, this is a whole new thing, and there are, certainly, moments when it HITS, when it coalesces with such intensity that you feel that old familiar oscillation of consciousness, that weird wingbeat of distraction-odd thoughts-image-fragments-as the brain clutches at its scattering particles in a kind of panic. (This is what Joe Carducci, rock writer extraordinaire, calls "the absolute surrealism of the next moment"-hallmark of the great live band.) But the moment passes, and you gag on the smoke, and-in fact-you leave before the band stops playing. Until next time, you mighty Queens.

Soul Brains (Live at Axis, Boston, March 4)

A gig I should have walked out of was the Soul Brains show, at Axis: What kept me in there, until the last feeble tap of HR's drumstick (he ended the show messing around on his brother's kit with Darryl dub-vamping on the bass), was--I suspect--the same cocktail of thwarted adoration and vaguely ghoulish curiosity that has sustained this band's career for so long. Too long, it is now clear. For yes, Soul Brains are Bad Brains, all original members, wrenching at the shrivelled udder of the poor, knackered cash cow (blades of vinegary scrub-grass between its teeth) for what must be the last time. The new name, I imagine, would be something to do with broken record contracts, and performance rights. (Remember the Bad Brains megabucks deal with a gleaming-eyed Maverick? that yielded one not-so-hot album?) Whatever, this is a band that has been comprehensively ironized by market forces because there ain't too much soul here.

In the words of Rabbi Pinhas (in Martin Buber's Tales of the Hasidim), "The soul teaches incessantly, but it never repeats." Of course, repetition has an exalted value in rock'n'roll--what is the great riff but Time on a loop of fury? --and as the legendary clanking coda to "Right Brigade" stacks on power, heaviness redoubled, you'd better believe that some things get better the more you do them BUT it's one thing to bear down on the screw of noise with furious precision, and quite another to stand onstage nearly twenty years after the event and recite-in weird finger-popping cabaret style-"Hey! We got that attitood-ah... Okay! We got that attitood-ah..." We're at the very outer rim of the explosion here, where shockwaves crumble into echoes. Look at HR, hiding behind a pair of red shades and a blissed-out grin that starts to run like thin paint as the evening wears on. The man's body used to sprout topsy-turvy from the bed of ROCK like some mad root, twisting and gnarling with the forces of growth-tonight he barely moves. He would sing like the gods were throttling him-tonight his gap-toothed mouth is a graveyard of the spirits. Alright, I overstate, but the point stands: this is Bad Brians karaoke.

The crowd is up for it, no question--the pit roils and flexes, centrifugally hurling off its clumps and dingleberries of unwanted matter-but it gets what it wants so quickly that its will is sapped. "Attitude," "Pay to Cum," "Sailin' On"-all served up like school dinners, to an audience half-stoned with satisfaction, before the set dwindles into the peterings-out of an extended reggae jam. As lights buzz on overhead and everyone turns for the door, some little minder/flunky is shoving busily through the packed-immobile crowd-"Comin' thru! Ho! Comin' thru!"-a burrowing germ of self-importance. "Hey," observes a voice mildly, "we're all trying to get outŠ" Flunky: "So let me thru, man, I got the band here!" Voice (surlier now): "I don't give a fuck..." Flunky (fists up): "Boy you BETTER give a fuck!" The twang of aggression turns heads, just in time to see the mighty Darryl smoothing things out, his cherub face glowing placidly. You better give a fuck... Yeah, well, maybe--this was one of the great bands, untouchable in their heights, so let them recoup what they can from the incredible outlay of energy they have made. I just won't be there if it happens again.

Lungfish: Artificial Horizon (Dischord)

What can I say to turn you on to Lungfish, near-contemporaries of Bad Brains (they're from the post-DC Baltimore scene) who have trod the pure path of obscurity right to glory's golden gates? Should I say that after twelve years of poetry, freakishness and experiment they still carry the authentic deposits of DC hardcore in their veins-in the lumbering, dub-inflected rhythm section, in the guitar that chugs, spirals, repeats its forms with beautiful, biological inevitability? Should I say that the roaring, oracular voice of Daniel Higgs-a tattoo artist and poet who lives in San Francisco and Baltimore-is one of the most untrumpeted revelations in rock, a genuine slice of vision and authority? That Higgs-who likes to record under nuthouse anagrammatic pseudonyms like Omon Ortsa and A. Astronomo Erdman-writes lyrics in which squirrels, dogs and trees command him to "shed the world," in which categories of existence are inspected with schizoid sensitivity, giving rise to many images of organs, eyelashes, amphibianism, and minute temperature changes? Or that he is also capable of cut-in-marble lines like "Through matter and through vacuum, by trial and by test/ Oppress yourself..."? Or that the moment in "Jonah" (a track on Sound in Time) when he screams "champi-ons of SIIIIIIN!" will make you feel that prophecy has you by the earlobes? That, live, Higgs gnashes his beard, crooks his hand to his chest in a palsy of inspiration, while an invisible-ink spiral (I think it's a spiral) tattooed on his forehead glows under the UV light? Higgs is a poet: Over seven albums he has roamed his lonely spectrum from end to end, snatching sense from a word-whirl like a swarm of bees. He has rained down his wrath in plagues, gazed thunderstruck, gorge rising, into his own pores and follicles, and tottered in abstracted wonderment through the natural world, bombarded by cosmic rays. Nothing is stable in his imagery-body is constantly slipping and blurring into mind, and mind congealing back into flesh, into the "cloak of organs." On Artificial Horizon, Lungfish's clearest-sounding, most complete record yet, his imagination seems to have ripened into a sort of luminous bafflement, the stillness of the man who knows he knows nothing-the voices are quieted, and half the album is purely instrumental: "This is the last song I sungŠ ." Like the squirrel tells him to, Higgs sheds the world: "the bills were piling upŠ I lost my keys/ The world vanished/ In a gentle breeze." Humbly, unabrasively, the music follows him-Mitchell Feldstein's drumming, which previously has lagged beneath the guitars like gravity, here becomes almost weightless, opening out into the chime of the ride cymbal and the quarter-struck tom. Asa Osborne's guitar rings and twists along its continuum, observing its private rituals and repetitions. The band are basically playing their own raw-nerved folk music now, notes that arise equally from sinew, emotion. and history. Lungfish have got so much soul it's spilling out of them in a kind of sacred clumsiness, and if you get anywhere near one of their records or shows you shouldn't miss it.

Various Artists: The Blasting Room (Owned & Operated)

An Honorable Mention must go to this compilation from the new Colorado-based label co-run by Joe Carducci and Bill Stevenson (king of rock-lit and Descendents/All/ex-Black Flag drummer respectively). The Blasting Room is named after O&O's purpose-built in-house studio, and it smartly showcases the label's bent for lean, in-the-pocket punk-pop with the occasional belch of heaviness like an irresistible urge. The opener--All's "Insensitive"--sets the tone: a bitingly produced, blazingly performed snort of popcore that rattles through ten different shapes in under a minute and even finds time to dally with the shade of Black Flag-era Greg Ginn in a couple of discreetly leering, toppling guitar-breaks. I say "discreetly" because the exemplary All, like most of the bands on the record, keep the guitar democratically locked down into chugs'n'powerchords-no frazzled despotic string-burning here, it's more about the unity of the crunch, the ALL. The assembled bands pursue this end with fiery expertise, from the gruff, slab-heavy Wretch Like Me to Someday I... whose admixture of college-rock wistfulness and whumping, tree-felling drumstrokes puts one in mind of Squirrel Bait. The highlight is My Name's "It's a Miserable Life," a roaring engine of a song fuelled on the woes of low-budget existence: "all the FRIENDS who sleep on COU-CHES!" (You talking about me??)