Live Review: Them Crooked Vultures, Sunday, Nov. 22 @ Roseland-- Local Cut

Live Review: Them Crooked Vultures, Sunday, Nov. 22 @ Roseland

November 23rd, 2009 [4:43PM] Posted by: Matthew Singer | 1 COMMENT

One benefit of not selling your soul to Satan: Eventually, you’ll end up playing keytar while your 6-foot-something frontman shimmies across the stage like Neil Diamond on stilts.

If you don’t know, according to rock lore, in the late 1960s three-fourths of Led Zeppelin (allegedly) struck a deal with the devil in exchange for global mega-stardom. The only holdout was mild-mannered bassist John Paul Jones. As such, the others became, together and individually, the biggest rock icons of the ’70s, while Jones is mostly remembered as the guy who also happened to be with them in photo shoots (which would’ve happened anyway, considering he’s the bass player in Led fucking Zeppelin). Of course, their supernatural dabbling came back to bite them, hard: John Bonham died; Robert Plant lost his son to a viral infection; and Jimmy Page, to steal a joke from Chuck Klosterman, was forced to collaborate with David Coverdale in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Jones has spent his life post-Zep free of tragedy, doing session work with a shitload of artists and writing orchestral arrangements for other bands, most memorably for R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People. It’s been a respectable career for the 63-year-old, if a bit of a quiet one.

Well, quiet until now.

Now, Jones is doing something the surviving Zeppeliners haven’t done in decades: playing in a totally badass hard rock band. Technically, Them Crooked Vultures, who tore through the Roseland on last night, is a supergroup—Jones is joined by Dave Grohl and Queens of the Stone Age mastermind Josh Homme—but that term is something of a misnomer: With longtime Homme collaborator Alain Johannes helping out live, it’s basically the best of the ever-revolving QOTSA lineup augmented by a Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famer, performing songs that sound like Songs for the Deaf outtakes. And that’s a good thing. Supergroups work best when one personality dominates; although the songwriting on Vultures’ self-titled debut is credited to the entire band, the crunching riffage, spurts of psychedelia and choirboy-gone-bad vocals identify this as a project navigated by Homme’s desert-fried vision.

Still, if the crowd who showed up for the four-piece’s sold-out Portland gig is any indication, the biggest draw of the three major names involved is Jones. Graying longhairs in Zeppelin shirts outnumbered younger hesher metalheads and Pitchfork readers; when Homme introduced the band (as if anyone outside Johannes needed an introduction), Jones received the loudest ovation. And yet, as in the past, Jones mostly stayed in the background. He served the music dutifully, switching from bass to guitar to the aforementioned keytar for the odd drug-rhumba “Interlude with Ludes” and, on the devastating opener “No One Loves Me, Neither Do I,” some sort of lap-steel variant. When he did get a solo, it was a fading keyboard outro for the spiraling psych-blues jam “Spinning in the Daffodils.” Other than that and when the frets on his bass lit up with blue lights, Jones appeared happy to remain the backbone rather than the face of the band.

Of course, he probably didn’t have much of a choice. As Jones is well aware, that’s what happens when you share space with a pair of beastly musicians. Grohl is the only legitimate heir to Bonham’s throne of rock’s most monstrous drummer; at the Roseland, he pounded through the classic-rock thump of “New Fang” and the band’s most propulsive track, the searing “Dead End Friends,” with such headbanging ferocity he must’ve given Jones flashbacks to Royal Albert Hall circa 1970. And Homme, while not exactly a guitar god, is a virtuoso in his own right. His distinctive, skuzzy playing style has always owed more to Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top’s roadhouse boogie than Page’s epic bombast, and while playing with Jones has brought out his Zeppelin influence a bit more, that hasn’t changed, as evidenced by the groovy solo that highlighted the set-closing “Warsaw or the First Breath You Take After You Wake Up.”

But Them Crooked Vultures is the rare all-star collaboration where all those superstar parts congeal into a truly powerful whole. Not everything clicks: the band lacks the dynamism of QOTSA and Led Zeppelin, preferring—with only a handful of exceptions—non-stop blunt force, and on less memorable tunes the incessant skull-crushing becomes mind numbing. But the group never aims higher than it should, and delivers in exactly the way fans hoped it would on paper. Like all supergroups, it’s a fun diversion for the individual members, so who knows how long it’ll last. One thing’s for sure, though: This is a lot more satisfying than a full-on, Bonham-less Zep reunion would’ve been. Trust me.

Links:
Them Crooked VultureSpace

Photo by Matthew Singer

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