Them Crooked Vultures

[shermarama]

I went to see Them Crooked Vultures in Hammersmith. The thing is, the album isn't anything hot. There's nothing on it that stands out. But played live by the people it was being played by, it was excellent. I could listen to Josh Homme sing all day; he sounds like he does on the records, and I've never seen anyone that big use falsetto so easily. Mind you, he should keep his guitar on. He did one song without and was doing some quite distressing dad dancing. That there Mr. Grohl was so good that if you weren't watching and didn't know anything about drumming, you wouldn't have known that he was doing some remarkable things up there. Also I liked his solution to the problem of how to manage a microphone in combination with drumming; he had a man stood behind the kit who swivelled the mike in and out as necessary. I hadn't realised how much singing he did, how much of the harmony was him, since the voices all match so well. John Paul Jones, meanwhile, didn't really stand out as such but played pretty much a different instrument every song with equal facility in all of them. No covers, no encores, just all the songs off the album, with extensions and variations and fag breaks as appropriate. It was just an excellent gig.