EAGLES OF DEATH METAL
Eagles of Death Metal is an American rock band from Palm Desert, California, formed in 1998 by Jesse Hughes and Josh Homme. Despite their band name, Eagles of Death Metal is not a death metal band. Hughes stated that a friend was introducing Josh Homme to the death metal genre. When Hughes played for Homme a song by the Polish band Vader and made a claim that the song was within the death metal genre, Homme then referred to Vader as “The Eagles of Death Metal”. After hearing this phrase, he wondered what a cross between the Eagles and a death metal band would sound like. (More from Wikipedia)
Of course, the other side of the complaint I mentioned above is that, sure enough, “they do still make ’em like they used to” from time to time. I heard an ad on VH1 the other day that used a killer track by the Black Keys as the background music. The success of this band – they’ve been going strong for more than a full decade now – proves that the Garage Rock Revival of the early 2000’s from bands like the White Stripes, the Hives, the Killers, Eagles of Death Metal, and Queens of the Stone Age still has some life in it.
(January 2012)
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I told the story of seeing Queens of the Stone Age with my wife Peggy in my last post; but their third album in 2002, Songs for the Deaf is probably when I realized that something was really going on out there in the larger world: rock music with a modern sound but with garage-rock roots. The Queens had a rotating line-up of like-minded musicians and grew out an earlier band with similar sensibilities called Kyuss; while they didn’t sell a lot of albums, they were a pioneer of the stoner-rock scene of the 1990’s. As the Allmusic article (by Eduardo Rivadavia) describes the band: “[T]he signature sound [of] Kyuss [combined] the doom heaviness of Black Sabbath, the feedback fuzz of Blue Cheer, and the space rock of Hawkwind, infused with psychedelic flashes, massive grooves, and a surprising sensibility for punk rock, metal, and thrash.” The connective tissue between the two bands is multi-instrumentalist Josh Homme, who also founded the popular Eagles of Death Metal.
(January 2013)
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Additionally, Natasha Shneider played piano on the “Josh Homme and Alain Johannes Backwards Remix” of a song by Unkle called “Eye for an Eye” that appears on their album Never, Never, Land (2003). For another Josh Homme project, Eagles of Death Metal, Alain Johannes plays piano and Natasha Shneider provides vocals (both uncredited) for the song “Who’ll Kiss the Devil” on their debut album, Peace, Love & Death Metal (2004).
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In 2006, Alain Johannes and Natasha Shneider co-produced the debut album Wires on Fire by Wires on Fire, another hard rock band in the mold of Queens of the Stone Age and Eagles of Death Metal; Shneider provided backing vocals on the opening track “Death to Jeff Lynn”.
(April 2015/2)
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The terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 included a shooting by three men armed with assault rifles inside the Bataclan Theatre during a concert performance by Eagles of Death Metal, claiming 89 lives. Dan Auerbach and his band the Arcs had a concert in Paris on the same night at another nearby venue, Le Trianon.
About this experience, Dan Auerbach said: “I know people that were there last night. I know people who are like, ‘What am I gonna do – see the Arcs or the Eagles of Death Metal?’ And I’ve woken up feeling very out of sorts. What do you call it, survivor’s remorse? Why the hell did it happen there and not where we were playing? I’m just so brokenhearted about all those people.”
(June 2017)
