Five years ago, Queens of the Stone Age were among the world's most extraordinary live acts. They evolved from Kyuss, a space-rock band renowned for throwing drug-fried parties in the Californian desert, and still resembled some kind of intimidating tribe who had wandered out of the sands, where one fancifully imagined they subsisted on a diet of peyote and human bones. Sandwiched between grunge phantom Mark Lanegan and clothes-averse bass viking Nick Oliveri, frontman and mastermind Josh Homme played straight man, an unyielding monolith around which the storm could rage.
But the pathologically restless Lanegan left to forge new alliances, and Oliveri was booted out for unspecified transgressions. With three anonymous sidemen, the singer radiates beefy efficiency rather than star power. That is one reason why this intimate warmup show, in the kind of venue they haven't played in years, doesn't generate the excitement it should. The frenzied mob is small; the ranks of beer-sipping head-nodders much larger.
Another reason is the glut of material from their forthcoming fifth album, Era Vulgaris. Instead of hits such as No One Knows, Queens play songs that no one knows. When, by way of introducing the decade-old Mexicola, Homme drawls, "Let's do some old stuff", the shriek from the crowd is almost pathetically grateful. Energised, a girl climbs onto her boyfriend's shoulders. Come the next new song, she climbs right back down again.
Of course, they have the right to champion their next album, but tonight does not serve notice that we should brace ourselves for a classic. Some songs, like Misfit Love, have riffs that could atomise concrete, but only Turnin' on the Screw advertises the ear for melody that has previously made Queens much more than an exercise in brute force. Without that, there is only precision and volume, and you can get that from a drill.
After less than an hour, they're gone, leaving underwhelmed fans to ponder the lopsided logic of such warmups. When you've made an effort to snap up limited tickets, or swelled the coffers of eBay hucksters, then watching your heroes prosaically plug their new product with minimal interaction and no encore must seem like a raw deal. They have to content themselves with sporadic oldies, such as Little Sister and In My Head, perhaps savouring the irony of the latter's refrain: "Keep on playing our favourite song." Chance would be a fine thing.
