"The ticket that exploded" - era vulgaris

behold, the image of pure piracy

   Like every single college student in 2007, I played Rock Band. At the time, Guitar Hero was a known quantity; my musical repertoire was not. I went into school with a rather limited vocabulary: Misfits, Rolling Stones, White Stripes, Gorillaz, Iron Maiden, and Drowning Fucking Pool. It was a miracle I had even bought copies of Demon Days or Get Behind Me Satan considering how rudimentary the rest of my iPod looked. The first CDs I owned were Sinner, War, and Hot Dog Flavored Water—there was no pervading logic or taste (maybe there would have been if I had bothered to listen to War, but my knowledge of U2 remained limited to "Vertigo" thanks to TV ads.)

It wouldn’t be a lie to say that sophomore year of college was significant for me—it essentially paved the road ahead for me in terms of social connections and relationships. I can trace back everything in my life experience to the ten-person suite I was put in. If I’d been somewhere else, there’s really no telling how radically different my existence would look. That aside, there were two crucial elements that were of huge importance when it came to my lifelong musical interests: Rock Band, and a briefly-operational music listening service called Ruckus.

  Rock Band doesn’t need too much of an introduction: it was an insanely popular thing on campus, everyone had a copy, and it was run into the ground after 5 or 6 years. I probably ruined 2 or 3 plastic drumkits either by stomping too hard on the kick pedal or making dents on the drum pads through my stick work. We played a lot, so I was exposed to hundreds of new songs and artists I’d had zero knowledge of. I missed out on the pop-punk trend in high school, and had almost no familiarity of any modern or classic rock hitmakers beyond the handful I’d gleaned from lucky Limewire downloads. I hung out with punk kids in high school and went to a few shows in church basements; I saw terrible screamo groups and a yet-to-be-moderately-famous Sex Slaves. Ramones, Sex Pistols, and Misfits were my bread and butter, but when the only Ramones song on the music game is relegated to the Baby Beginner level and nobody wanted to revisit the simple chord structures, I didn’t get to pick it often.
  It was for the best. What followed was the discovery of David Bowie, R.E.M, Queens Of The Stone Age, The Who, The Banshees, The Strokes, and countless more. The vista of bands I got into via the tracklist of this game is incalculable; it had to have been around a hundred new obsessions that stemmed from bashing drumpads and clicking fake bass guitars. The next step would be possibly more taxing, more expensive: how do I get my hands on all those CDs?


   Ruckus isn’t going to be a name that many people recognize—it was a niche music streaming service for college students from around 2005 to 2009. My school had a subscription to it, which meant we all got access to it for free. Suddenly, I had everything I’d learned about from Rock Band at my fingertips—but it was about to get even better. In the age of MP3s and the wild west, you were lucky to get actual tracks on Limewire or some kind of unsafe torrent—oftentimes you’d be left holding one of those omnipresent clips of Bill Clinton that were essentially a kind of downloaded rickroll. To wade through miles of this detritus and get full libraries--entire albums—of several artists was just not gonna happen. Luckily, the ace in the hole was one of the reasons I’m sure Ruckus went under: someone discovered how to backdoor the downloaded data from the Ruckus player itself, and convert the raw, encrypted files into usable mp3s. My roommates introduced me to this process, and many days later I’d gone werewolf on everything Ruckus had to offer. To this day, the continued MP3 library across my many external hard drives is probably 60% comprised of the scraped content from that Ruckus service. It was the beginning of everything.

       I continue to maintain that David Bowie was the most significant part of the heist—my encyclopedic knowledge of his work is staggering. But at a close second was Queens Of The Stone Age, which I’d been intrigued by since hearing them in Rock Band and then transitioning into their current release, Era Vulgaris. I didn’t know it til a bit later, but this wasn’t the first time I’d heard Josh Homme’s voice and liked it—one of my favorite movies at the time was The Dangerous Lives Of Altar Boys, which Homme had done the score for. I loved the end credits song "All The Same" and had owned it on my music player for years, so in a way Homme had been there the whole time under my nose and I’d never thought to research what else he did. It was a lifelong love affair; I’ve seen them 4 times (tied for most with School Of Seven Bells) and when magnus opus Like Clockwork was released, I had people texting me about how much they adored the album—almost as if I was the goodwill ambassador for the group I always envisioned myself to be when I was younger. This continued all the way up until the In Times New Roman era, when I had stopped listening to them due to the unsettling feeling I got from Josh’s personal demons getting worse plus the relatively uninspired 4th concert I had seen. I still have them on some playlists, but the desire to stay in step with their work has waned in the last few years.

I really loved QOTSA. The sludge of the head-cold guitars, the impeccable turns of phrases Homme wrote, the rock-solid lineup of faces you’d know by name at every concert, and just the overwhelming dripdrop ooze of their aesthetic. Stoner rock/robot rock were terms used to describe them; sludge rock was another. All various ways to grasp at the sound of the semihollow guitars and sinister swagger. It was also labeled desert rock, given that the sound had been in its infancy with Kyuss and other groups in the spaces of nothingness in California.
 I wasn’t aware that people were on a bit of a downturn with Era Vulgaris, as it was the entry point for me, even before the seminal Songs for the Deaf or Rated R. The hardline sound drenched in slop that had been cooked up in the less-than-favorited Lullabies To Paralyze was taken to the extreme on Era Vulgaris. It was a little shocking to walk backward from this and experience the more stripped down production on something like Rated R, or even hear other contributors like Mark Lanegan popping up consistently—a lot of supporting vocals had dissipated by Era Vulgaris. In fact, in the wake of the following album being a more radical evolution in Like Clockwork, Era Vulgaris is kind of a weird stopgap betwixt the accepted Songs for the Deaf timeline and the more somber odyssey in Like Clockwork. From the start with "Turnin On The Screw," the ride you’re in for is not the summer car cruise in the previous albums; it’s a profession of being knockdown dragout warped, not caring about it, and reaching out a gnarled claw in acknowledgement. It’s the last gasp of taking the dirt to the limit, testing the mettle of the grittiness by committing fully to the darkness. With Like Clockwork, there was a quality of mercy—a humble slant, even, which is understandable once you know about Homme’s near-death stint. Era Vulgaris was the last time the band would take a bat to the storefront without apologizing. Compare the closing number of this album with some of the others; "Long Slow Goodbye" is pissed away regret put next to the predatory threat of "Run Pig Run", which is followed by the most existential lamentation in Like Clockwork’s self-titled finale. You could argue the album’s last-minute cut of the self-titled track is also worthy of being its ending, framing the whole ride as being viewed “from a crumbling tower / I see everything. There’s no love anyplace.” It’s a strange place to visit after its proceeding kin is so open about professing its sadness, its splintering love and promises leaking out from over the sides of the sinking ship. Era Vulgaris was the last time QOTSA was young. There would still be mailboxes to knock over a la "Sick Sick Sick"’s rapidfire anthem (which was my ringtone for 2 years in school) but there would be a counterbalance to it in the future albums. Era Vulgaris asks you to merely acknowledge the terror of the warp, take stock of the sutures that are already fastened; Like Clockwork is the waking realization that the exhilaration’s over—or, as a bonus track off EV would say, that The Fun Machine Took A Shit And Died.

Era Vulgaris is the nostalgia album, hearkening a time when I could sit and eat a whole block of cheese and a quart of Pepsi at 2am without gaining 5 pounds immediately after. I was penniless but had all the music I could ever ask for; my responsibilities were almost nil. I even got away with wearing tinted glasses and cargo pants like I was some shifty skateboarder. Some things changed but in essence, others stayed the same: the same way I posted scores of sticky notes on my dorm office wall to help me remember fiction plot points I was writing, my current desk at work has over 20+ notes stuck to the rims of the monitors. People still marvel at the mad scientist nature of it all; that hasn’t changed, either. But in 2025, the QOTSA vinyl I own isn’t of Era Vulgaris, it’s Like Clockwork. I remember the crumbling tower—the old, mice-bitten apartment I left my old Rock Band instruments behind in—but I don’t live there anymore.   

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