Words originally for Outline Magazine.
Label: Universal
Release Date: October 2nd, 2015
There comes a time in every rock star’s career when two things can happen; either they continue crafting fantastic, glamorous guitar music, planting their flag in a generation’s pop culture lunar surface, or they stagnate, cheesing and sleazing their way through album after album about girls and fast cars but with less passion than they used to. It’s at this difficult crossroad we find Josh Homme (of Queens of the Stone Age fame) rekindling the EODM fire with long-time collaborator Jesse Hughes for their first LP in seven years. As the title may suggest, Zipper Down is a pretty half-arsed attempt by two grown men to recapture the spirit of their youths, and in all the wrong ways. The churning guitars and hook-driven choruses are energetic and catchy and Homme’s dreary vocals bring substance to the record, like on Skin Tight Boogie, but the lyrics and even the song titles let the side down. Got A Woman is slapdash and careless, “I got a woman who likes to shake her ass… come on baby get movin’” and The Deuce is disappointingly old fashioned. Not even a Duran Duran cover, 1982’s Save A Prayer, can save Zipper Down, a mid-life crisis of an album which comes across creepy and vulgar more than a balls-out retrospective of two aging rockers’ golden eras. No pun intended.
4/10
