TCV Gives Us High-Quality Video For Christmas

TCV Announce Record Release Date, Living Finally Worthwhile

Them Crooked Vultures’ eponymous, self-produced debut album will be released on November 17th. Not surprisingly, the QOTSA-esque “New Fang” has been announced as the first single.

Them Crooked Vultures Do New York

It is a rare occasion that anything lives up to massive hype – Alex Rodriguez, iPhone, Inglourious Basterds, Lebron James and Artichoke Pizza among them, but you can now add to that list the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures. Thoughts following Thursday night’s set at the Roseland Ballroom in New York:

1.)   Josh Homme is the greatest frontman of the current generation (Eat your heart out, Wes Scantlin), and because of this, Them Crooked Vultures bears more influence from Queens of the Stone Age than any of the other bands in its rockin’ pedigree. Homme appears along with his wingman, Queens guitarist Alain Johannes, and the two of them have a chemistry that makes Mr. & Mrs. Obama look like Mr. & Mrs. Clinton.

2.)   Good for John Paul Jones, who not only keeps up with a band of dudes who grew up listening to his music, but is an active participant in creating music with them that is more cutting edge than just about anything produced in the past couple of years that doesn’t involve people named “Yorke,” “Greenwood” or “Rodriguez-Lopez.”

3.)   Dave Grohl is, first and foremost, a drummer and the heir apparent to John Bonham as the hardest-hitting dude in rock. The fact that he fronts his own band that is perfectly average at worst is the equivalent of a star shortstop strapping on a pair of skates and being a league-average hockey player.

4.)   Them Crooked Vultures works where other supergroups fail (Velvet Revolver, I’m looking your way) because TCV is better than the sum of its parts. Where as Audioslave was Rage Against the Machine with a different singer and the Traveling Wilbury’s were a bunch of frontmen standing next to each other with their guitars and microphones, TCV consists of one frontman, one talented but reserved perennial second fiddle and a drummer who is perfectly aware of his role as the badass backbone of the operation.

5.) The instrumentation throughout the show was a bit offputting. I’m pretty sure that during one song both Jones and Johannes were playing bass and during another, a keytar made an appearance. The keytar is obviously awesome, but the song they used it for was a bit too weird, with Homme putting down his guitar and prancing around the stage like Patrick Bateman getting ready to kill Paul Allen with an ax.

6.) No Encore = Amazing. I’m tired of the drill.

Them Crooked Vultures Exist!

Baby, Don’t Tease Me…

Accompanying the 14 seconds of badass rock music linked above is a button on the Them Crooked Vultures website marked “X,” which directs users to a view of the north Atlantic Ocean in Google Earth, a single black and white Jpeg of the band and like the true rockstars these guys are, a $30 tee-shirt they have kindly made available for purchase.

What cool guys.

Topps Presents: C-3PO & His Huge Robot Cock

In an interview with Power 97 in Winnipeg last week, Eagles of Death Metal frontman Jesse “The Devil” Hughes dropped two bombs of explosive interest to Rake Blog and its readers. First off, the name of the

The Devil himself

aforementioned Josh Homme-Dave-Grohl-J.P. Jones superduper group is Them Crooked Vultures. Hughes revealed the band’s name for the first time and mentioned that there are plans for the band to tour in 2009 before seemingly biting his tongue and mentioning that he may not have been at liberty to divulge such epic details.

A close second to word of the Queens of the Zep-vana tour, was Hughes’ revelation of what he considers to be his most-prized possession: A 1978 Topps Star Wars trading card featuring lovable co-dependent C-3PO sporting a massive robot erection. A bit of research revealed that the card is fairly well-known and the boner is 100% there for the laughin’ at. This isn’t some Lion King bullshit where you have to look at just the right time and it’s open to interpretation; this is nothing but hilarious robot boner.