Eagles Of Death Metal - 'Death By Sexy' (SonyBMG) Released 03/07/06

Rock’n’roll’s favourite 7 foot redhead is back again, with his falsetto singing hillbilly friend for another round of swamp blues and southern soul, but is it as fun second time around? The answer…fuck no. Homme’s side project debut came in 2004 and had the hallmarks of a veteran musician attempting to branch out and just have fun, either that or he was trying to keep up with Dave Grohl’s exploits and explorations into new music, either way it sounded pretty cool. Nothing new, nothing fantastic but it was fun and you could swing your hips to it. ‘Death By Sexy‘ however has the effect of a new born. You’ll put up with it for a while cos it’s cute and stuff, but in the end you realise it is just gonna shit everywhere and cry and get boring very fast, so you give it back to its parents. Sadly with this album, if you have already bought this you can’t give it back so easily. Anyway enough digression.

Whoever told Homme he was a good drummer needs to be fly-kicked in the face, as his one beat rhythms are monotonous and lack any sort of enthusiasm, not a great thing for a 15 track album to say the least. Jesse Hughes does his best to rock it up a bit with his trademark high pitched voice and rolling blues riffs, but to no avail as everything comes across tired from very early on. Putting the three singles as the first three tracks on the record was probably not the best idea as soon as the promising handclap worthy ‘I Want You So Hard’, the droningly heavy ‘I Got a Feeling’ and the QOTSA possible b-side that is ‘Cherry Cola’ are all over, it’s down hill all the way as every song sounds samey and wouldn’t even be worthy as a desert sessions b-side.

Basically it’s all tamed down signature QOTSA riffs backed up against lyrics that a 15 year old hormonal boy would even be embarrassed to hear. Their sexual one track minds come to a head (no pun intended) on tracks like the embarrassingly bad ‘Solid Gold’ (“we’ll give you jiggles and make you sweat”) the tiresome ‘Keep Your Head Up’ (“Pointy kitty won’t you give us some play/ It’s sho nuff time that you be blowin our minds”) and the impossibly boring ‘Don’t Speak (I Came To Make A Bang)’ with familiar lyrics such as “I'm in too smooth, you never see me comin”. Ok the album is called ‘Death By Sexy’ but please this is just time filling bullshit, talking about getting down and dirty with anything that moves loses its appeal after the first 4 or five tracks, especially when the musicians can only play one or two chords on the good ol’ guitar.

Homme, along with his cohorts in the form of J Devil Hughes have created an album that surely will appear in the bargain bin at woollies very soon as his self indulgent trip is going to disappoint those who may have got on to their vibe a few years back. An album that should have been an EP, don’t be expecting big things.