RDS Dublin/Queens Of The Stone Age/Ambassador, Dublin/Tony Clayton-Lea for quite some time prior to the release of their 2000 album Rated R, Queens Of The Stone Age didn't exactly help matters by engaging in fairly puerile public nudity (off-putting and thoroughly unnecessary, I'm sure you'll agree) and writing songs that boasted the indisputably silly but rather catchy stoner chorus of "Ecstasy, heroin, cocaine, marijuana".
That was before this year's Songs For The Deaf, the Southern California band's third record, and one that is infused with a disconcerting, sombre tone (QOTSA members Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri had both been through divorces and family bereavements) and precision-tooled instrumentation.
The band took to the stage amid a swirl of pupil-popping lights and lighting effects, and proceeded to pummel the life out of the venue and the capacity audience. Vocal duties were shared between Homme, Oliveri and regular collaborator, former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan; while the former two sandblasted their way through new and old material, it was the latter who occupied the gig's most severely dolorous nooks and crannies.
Lanegan's presence on the hard rocking, downright weird lullaby, Hangin' Tree, and Songs For The Deaf's twisted'n'gnarled Middle Eastern metal was more than a relief from his friends' eye-bulging screeches - it focused the material as a whole and gave it even more substance. In between and around this were the onslaught of hard rock dynamics and tattooed, metronomic beats. Occasionally, the lengthy metal jams wore on, but they were underpinned with such exacting force (think Husker Dü arm-in-arm with Black Sabbath) that it was difficult to disengage.
Pop music? We certainly don't think so, but if QOTSA have set out to make the much-maligned genre of hard rock (which can so easily be strained, banal and vacuous) strange and accessible again, it looks like they've succeeded.
Striking Distance
Granary, Cork
Mary Leland
the evidence of a taut production from Graffiti Theatre at the Granary in the Cork Fringe Festival, Raymond Scannell's first play, Striking Distance, justifies its selection for the SEEDS Project run by Rough Magic. It is also the winner of ISDA's Special Award for Innovation, recommendations, which indicates the presence of a significant new talent. Awards are one thing, however, and performance quite another; what is important about Emelie FitzGibbon's direction is that her imposition of style on what is still somewhat rough-hewn material allows all its quality to become evident. As played by Simon Delany, Mark O'Brien and Jessica Regan on a split set designed by Olan Wrynn, Striking Distance is an account of modern teenage school life, where boredom is relieved by dares which become dangerous, and where affinities are always subject to challenge because they are instinctive or only half-understood. The central device is the merging of the fantasy experience lived through gothic comics, and the inevitable conflicts with reality which result. This introduces the mingling of direct and indirect speech which, although controlled and coherent for the most part, has moments of confusion. Characters whose presence is revealed only in voice-over are given a little too much to say - and that predictable - but these elements will not distract the young audiences for which this production is designed, nor can they disguise the vitality and occasional lyricism of Scannell's writing.
Striking Distance tours post-primary schools in Munster and South Leinster until November 29th, tel: 021-4397111
Hugh Tinney (piano)
Douglas Sealy
Sonatas No 12 in A flat, op. 26; No 11 in B flat, op.22; No 25 in G, op. 79; No 30 in E, op. 109 by Beethoven
Tinney's playing is characterised by its limpidity. Playing Beethoven at the RDS, he clarified the structures in a way that revealed the composer not as a man ruled by personal passions and private tragedies, but as an architect of sound who calculated the time and place of every note and knew exactly how to realise his desired effects. Composer and interpreter seemed at one, more especially in op. 109, which is one of the peaks of Beethoven's achievement and demands an exceptional pianist. It was in this sonata that Tinney's cool and level-headed appreciation of form was forced, as it were, to transcend itself and give utterance, as indeed the score requests, to the most deep of feelings.
The other sonatas, though of lesser stature, had their share of delights. Op. 79, almost a miniature by Beethoven's standards, was made both enraging and thoughtful; and op. 22 seemed an inexhaustible store of invention. Tinney never exaggerates and never seems to impose himself on the music in the way that one feels Beethoven as a player may have done, but his reluctance to strut allows all sorts of little details to sparkle in a clear light.
