Desert Sessions, Vols. 11 & 12, Album Review
Desert Sessions
Vols. 11 & 12
Album Review
I was instantly interested when discovering the enormous musical collective that goes by the name of Desert Sessions. The series was founded by Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme.
With the newest edition to the colourful discography shared by the artists that make up Desert Sessions, Vols. 11 & 12 is what people have described to be a "compilation album", and my gateway into this intriguing project.
Since 1997, Homme has rounded up a bunch of other artists to the tiny studio in Joshua Tree, California. In this newest instalment, my discovery of Jake Shears, and Royal Blood's Mike Kerr also being on the bill sharpened my keenness to give this album a listen.
It is clear from the get go that each artist involved, definitely seem to be having fun when creating this album. And in turn, I felt a great sense of enjoyment myself.
Despite having such a large team of talents collaborating on this, Vols. 11 &12 have a total of just 8 tracks, and a small runtime of just over half an hour. And unfortunately, this is the root of a fair few problems on the album.
The most glaring of these matters, is that too much musical styles are being heavy-handedly crammed into to little of a time-slot. I'd say that an exaggerative comparison (but a comparison nonetheless) would be this; imagine seeing a bunch of artists that you enjoy live, perhaps six different bands you enjoy. Now imagine them all playing their own songs at the same time on the same stage. While this analogy doesn't really reflect how the album sounds, but it does in-fact reflect how I feel about the album.
Furthermore, each track seems to crash with one-another. A good example would be songs 4,5, and 6. The first of the bunch being a progressive ballad which begins with an acoustic guitar melody. The next is a relentless, hard-hitting, and dynamic punk style banger. And the last is a colourful, quirky, and animated electronic bop.
While any of these styles would be fine on their own, I can't really sense a coherent connection between any of the tracks. In other words, the music doesn't nearly have as much chemistry as the artists behind it.
Lastly, many of the songs on this album feel just ambient enough to fall short of being anything memorable. Either that, or they just come off as obnoxiously goofy (to be specific, I didn't really enjoy "Chic Tweetz" for that exact reason)
Nevertheless, there are a fair few tracks I still found enjoyable enough to ultimately compel me to give this album a review. As I expected, however, the artist which I knew before Desert Sessions filled in the main roles for most of these tracks.
The main man Josh Homme wrote and employed his vocals and bass playing for the second track "Noses In Roses Forever", which I liked for its groovy blend of gritty desert-rock guitar and more orchestral strings.
We also see Mike Kerr and Jake Shears making for a dynamic duo on the brilliantly energetic "Crucifire"; the previously mentioned track 5.
We also hear Jake Shears take the mantle of lead vocals in the track "Something You Can't See", which feels like a song straight out of the Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah era.
All-in-all, Vols. 11 & 12 proved to be an interesting delve into an even more interesting project. If a larger time-span had been allowed for the compilation, this may have allowed the different styles to space themselves out just that little bit more.
Thank you for reading,
Booth Boy
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