Rated R: Reissued

Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri 

At 36, there are a lot of things that begin to make you feel old. You might find you manage to hurt yourself doing minor yard work. And then you don't heal very quickly. In fact it might take months before that shoulder sprain finally goes away... Yup.

Like learning that your body is beginning what will be a long decline, the anniversaries of landmark records from my 20s are signposts that time is slipping away. This week's release of one of my favorite records, Queens of the Stone Age's Rated R is a perfect example.

It's hard to believe that the Pixies' Doolittle is more than  20 years old. But the Pixies feel like history (they've felt like history for a long time, actually. Very good history, but history nonetheless). That Rated R is 10 years old is altogether different. Queens of the Stone Age do not feel like history. They're still around. Just last year, Queens leader Josh Homme was part of Them Crooked Vultures. The Pixies are the past. The Queens are now.

The thing that was so great about Rated R is that it was a real shot in the arm to heavy duty, riff roaring guitar rock. Unlike nearly every other band that trades in heavy riffage, Queens songs aren't relegated to death, demons, the end of the world or death by demons at the end of the world. Like few other exceptions in Black Sabbath-inspired psychedelic rock oeuvre in which it worked,  Rated R was for adults, not Dungeons and Dragons addicts.

Josh Homme and former partner Nick Oliveri (he was fired by Homme after Songs for the Deaf) were genuinely strange. And funny. From the album's blistering opener "Feel Good Hit of the Summer" and it's sing-a-long chorus "Nicotine, valium, vicodin,  marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol ... co-co-co-co-co-cocaine" to the plodding, 8-minute-plus closing jam "I Think I lost My Headache" Rated R's were (still are, really) full of invention (in fact, "Headache" dissolves into an oom-pah-pah of brass in the final minutes, not the usual territory for a rock band with a similar sound.

Homme and Oliveri weaved many textures into their sound. It was heavy but often branched into and incorporated other sounds. There's the haunting single note keys behind the chug of "The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret." The bongo intro of "Better Living Through Chemisty." The cheerleader section behind "The Quick and the Pointless." And the electric piano / dub bounce of "In the Fade." The whole was innovative and still, now, sounds remarkably fresh. Of course, Queens would come to sound like mainstream rock in some ways, but that has more to do with rock catching up to them than the other way around.

The reissue contains an extra disc with 5 unreleased studio tracks and 10 live songs, all but one of which were recorded at Reading Festival in 2000 (like so many other innovative American rock bands, Queens has long found friendlier fans in the U.K.). The tracks are interesting, but not essential. The choices made when Queens released Rated R the first time were the right ones.

Rated R is a risky gem of a rock record -- One well worth spinning again. Even if it makes you realize that you're not getting any younger.