Like a Bomb

Dead Planet: SonicSlowMotionTrails arrived September 4, 2006. Twenty years ago today. Punkified stoner rock. Seventeen tracks. Snarling from the first note. “Like a Bomb” opens the album. No setup. No ceremony. Recorded at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 and at Donner & Blitzen Studios in Arcadia, California, the album features Oliveri on bass, vocals, and guitar alongside Dave Catching and Alfredo Hernández from the QOTSA orbit. AllMusic called it “easily the finest Mondo Generator release yet” and wrote that it proved Oliveri “was much more of a contributor to Queens of the Stone Age than many had believed.” The record made that argument. It made it loudly.

The Coachella Valley in the late 1980s had no real infrastructure for heavy music. Kyuss played generator parties in the desert, running PA and amplifiers off flatbed trucks with no power grid to tap into. That constraint shaped the sound. Downtuned. Slow. Wide open. When Blues for the Red Sun arrived in 1992, it sparked what became stoner rock and desert rock. Sleep followed. Fu Manchu. Electric Wizard. Every band that came after drew from the same source. Louder Sound called it the cult masterpiece that sparked the stoner rock revolution. Nick Oliveri was part of Kyuss from the beginning, present when the template was being laid. That desert architecture is still running underneath everything.

When Kyuss dissolved in 1995, Josh Homme rebuilt the architecture as Queens of the Stone Age. Oliveri rejoined in 1998 and stayed through the band’s most celebrated period. Rated R in 2000. Songs for the Deaf in 2002, Gold-certified and lauded as some of the most adventurous heavy rock the decade produced. He was bass, screaming, and raw counterweight to Homme’s melodic precision. When he was fired in 2004, that chapter closed. Mondo Generator had been running in parallel since 1999. With the departure, it became the primary vessel. The original sequence is the statement. Track one makes it clear from the first second.