Artist
Them Crooked Vultures
Los Angeles, United States · 2009 – 2010
Them Crooked Vultures is a music group from Los Angeles, United States, active 2009–2010. Their discography on Gatefold includes 2 records.
2
Albums tracked
80
In collections
2009
Since
Biography
Josh Homme hosted his own 36th birthday party in 2009 and decided the best present was starting a band with Led Zeppelin's bass player. He called Dave Grohl. Dave called John Paul Jones. That is not a boardroom marketing scheme. That is a collective of absolute lifers wanting to see if they could out-groove each other in a room with no record label executives breathing down their necks. They tracked the self-titled record in Burbank at Pink Duck Studios with Alain Johannes helping out on the side. Most supergroups are lazy cash grabs that sound like a compromise between three different lawyers. This one worked because nobody had to play nice. Homme brought the sleazy desert-rock slide guitar. Grohl played with the violent, propulsive hunger he had back in '91 before he became the nice guy of rock. Jones just anchored the entire affair with that massive, sliding Manson custom eight-string bass. It is a dense, deeply weird rock record that sounds like three guys trying to break their instruments in real time.
Bio from The Clerk
The Arc of Them Crooked Vultures
The pivots — what forced Them Crooked Vultures to reinvent.
The Burbank Secret Sessions
They spent most of 2009 hiding in Pink Duck Studios under total secrecy to avoid the standard supergroup hype machine. Homme handled the production himself, stripping away the polished arena-rock sheen of mid-2000s Foo Fighters and the heavy stoner sludge of Queens of the Stone Age. What came out was dry, hyper-compressed, and rhythmically complex. You can hear the isolation in the tracks. The songs are built on weird time signatures and sudden, jagged tempo shifts that required three master players in the same room to even pull off.
Influences
- Led Zeppelin — John Paul Jones literally wrote the book on heavy, syncopated blues-rock basslines in this band. You hear his signature groove-heavy arrangement style all over 'Scumbag Blues,' which directly mirrors the clavinet-and-bass interplay of 'Trampled Under Foot.' It is the rhythmic DNA of the entire project.
- Cream — Homme has repeatedly cited the classic 1960s power trio format as the ultimate test of a rock band's chemistry. The relentless jamming and shifting improvisations on 'Elephants' directly echo the live, runaway-train dynamics of 'Spoonful.' They took the blues-rock trio blueprint and just turned the distortion up.
- The Jimi Hendrix Experience — Grohl has spoken about studying Mitch Mitchell's jazz-influenced, heavy-handed drumming style as a primary inspiration for his work on this record. His riding on the crash cymbals and fast tom fills on 'Mind Eraser, No Chaser' are straight out of the Mitchell playbook. It keeps the heavy riffs from sounding too stiff.
- Kyuss — As Homme's first major band, this group pioneered the low-tuned, generator-party desert rock sound that defines his guitar style. The massive, down-tuned main riff of 'No One Loves Me & Neither Do I' utilizes the exact same C-standard guitar tuning Homme used on Blues for the Red Sun. It is the raw dirt beneath the band's technical chops.
- Queens of the Stone Age — The band functioned as a direct evolution of the robotic, driving rhythms Homme developed on Songs for the Deaf. Alain Johannes, a frequent Queens collaborator, joined as their touring rhythm guitarist to help recreate the dense studio tracking on stage. The mechanical, hypnotic guitar loops on 'Gunman' are pure Rated R era songwriting.
Discography
Their records — most-collected first.
Related artists
Around the web
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