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  Queens of the Stone Age Era VulgarisBy Daniel JohnsonJul 3, 2007 The most telling moment of Era Vulgaris - Queens of the Stone Age's fifth, most-visceral record - happens 45 seconds into the second track. When the entire band crushes abrasive downbeats over the words "Sick, Sick, Sick" in unison, all separation vanishes. You no longer hear individual instruments, only the sound of many becoming one through the power of rock. Letting one's self get swallowed by the collective energy has always been the greatest end of musical experience; its pursuit, the single thread linking QOTSA's many lineup changes and genre exercises. QOTSA formed at the turn of the millennium - when popular music had run out of new things to say - and took the path of their fellow synthesists who would attempt to reassemble centuries of culture into a glorious new whole. Whereas Beck sought a unified theory of party music, and Bjork the avant-garde, QOTSA chased something deeper and less obvious, a summary channeling of the Dionysian spirit - the release of ecstatic self-liberation through the pleasures of madness and chemical influence. Theirs is a dissertation on all which springs from the hip and the boogie lust coursing through everything from ritual dance to Elvis to Black Sabbath. Vulgaris is brewed in the most primal color possible, a soupy brown of midrange blast. For all the band's permutations, most absent from the new sound is the studio itself - that over-compartmentalized, fussed-over take on rock's heaviest forms that the band made their name on. They are better for it. Gone are the highly-processed guitar and drum tones and studio trickery perfected to within an inch of its life. All that remains is a great cacophonous smear; the sound of performance rather than production. Leaner song structures lend a fat-free feel to typically wide-screen chord progressions. It's QOTSA gone native as glam shamans giving voice to the demons beneath metrosexual sublimation.
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