For the first
seventeen years of their existence, Eagles of Death Metal were perpetually
miscast. They should have seen that coming—as a garage rock band that relies
heavily on tongue-in-cheek, exaggerated seventies rock stereotypes, their sound
bears only minimal resemblance to the Eagles or to death metal. With their
first album coming less than a year and a half after drummer Josh Homme reached
mainstream success with his band Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal
were inevitably labeled as a “side project” for Homme—the band’s true leader
was always singer/guitarist Jesse Hughes, whose idiosyncratic mix of Canned
Heat-inspired vocals, rockabilly guitar influences, and love of campy rock and
roll conventions made him a compelling counterpoint to Homme, a tall, muscular,
handsome stage presence. Homme as a frontman was functionally arena rock—Hughes
as frontman was an oddball. It was this combination that has made Eagles of
Death Metal a consistently exciting band. It also made them perhaps uniquely
unqualified for the role that tragic circumstances thrust upon them.
Eagles of Death Metal
have had moderate popular success—a few appearances in commercials and on
soundtracks and a top 40 hit on the U.S. Alternative Charts in “Wannabe in L.A.”
But the entire tone surrounding the band permanently changed on November 13,
2015, when the band’s headlining performance at Paris’s Bataclan theater was
attacked by ISIL terrorists. The band members survived without injury; 90
others, including their merchandise manager, were killed. Suddenly, one of the
least serious bands in the world, a band arguably most famous for their inside
joke of a name, became a rallying cry.
The band was
understandably shaken by the events—while Jesse Hughes defiantly declared less
than two weeks later than he wanted EODM “to be the first band that plays the
Bataclan when it opens back up”, this came during an interview during which the
touring members and Homme (who was absent during the Paris attacks and only
sporadically performs live with the band) openly and unabashedly wept. But it
suddenly became imperative among the rock community that this band survive.
Many artists covered the band’s part-French “I Love You All the Time”, with
proceeds from sales going to victims of the attack. A campaign began to get
their cover of Duran Duran’s “Save a Prayer” to #1 on the UK singles
chart—while it fell short, the cover became the band’s biggest hit, and Duran
Duran, who had performed the song live with EODM prior to the attacks, agreed
to donate their royalties to charity. A band for whom a show at a 1,500 seat
theater was typical was playing alongside U2 at a 17,000+ seat arena in Paris
less than a month after the attacks.
In the wake of the
Paris attacks, the music world wanted to rally around Eagles of Death Metal and
they wanted the kind of reassuring stadium rock U2 provided. Both were still
independently possible, but people wanted the two in one package. But U2 is the
band that made “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “One”, while Eagles of
Death Metal is the band who were touring an album titled Zipper
Down whose cover featured a woman whose otherwise-exposed breasts were
covered by pictures of the band’s two principal members.
Normally, there is
plenty of room in the world of rock and roll for both of these types of bands.
Post-Bataclan, there was demand for one. A dark but impossible to deny fact is
that Eagles of Death Metal never had, and likely never will, generate more
publicity than they did on what was at the same time the worst moment in the
band’s history. Having a member who two years prior to the attacks fronted a
band with the #1 album in the United States wasn’t enough to give EODM
headlines. The number of people who researched the band upon hearing “I Only
Want You” in Windows 8 advertisements or “Now I’m a Fool” after seeing Silver
Linings Playbook paled in comparison to the number of people who heard
about “this band that doesn’t actually sound like the Eagles nor death metal”
through news coverage of a story much larger than the band itself.
Eagles of Death Metal
began 2016 with a relaunch of their delayed European tour, now renamed the Nos
Amis (“Our Friends”, in English) Tour. The band returned to Paris in February
and the subsequent tour became the subject of an HBO documentary directed by
Colin Hanks which was released in February 2017. But within a month of EODM’s
by all accounts triumphant return to face-melting garage rock in Paris, the era
of good feelings ended for the band.
Jesse Hughes had been
open about his political leanings—conventionally conservative in some ways but
in many ways guided by reactionary emotion—before Bataclan. As somebody who
disagrees with Hughes on virtually every political issue on which he has ever
espoused an opinion, this never bothered me much, largely because Eagles of
Death Metal is almost aggressively not a political band. Like
the bands from which they drew inspiration—mid-period Rolling Stones,
early-period Aerosmith, every-period-until-the-day-they-die AC/DC—EODM wrote
and performed songs about sex, drugs, rock and roll, and virtually nothing
else. Some have likened Hughes to a young generation’s Ted Nugent, but unlike
Nugent, Hughes hasn’t been known to get on his political soapbox during
concerts. This certainly wasn’t a Rage Against the Machine situation, where a
conservative politician like Paul Ryan being a fan of a band with such far left
lyrical content seems contradictory. Artist and art are easily separated in
this case.
But Hughes’s comments
post-Bataclan ventured from potentially divisive to downright disturbing. His
initial claim, which as it turned out was merely him dipping his toes into
controversial waters, was that gun control had enabled the Bataclan attack and
that had French citizens been permitted to bear arms, the attack could have
been stopped. He then turned up the heat by claiming, without substantiation or
any subsequent evidence that he or anyone else has presented, that he saw
Muslims celebrating in the streets of Paris the night of the attack. In another
interview, Hughes alleged that the attack was an inside job, claiming that
security personnel who did not show up that night were aware of what was
coming. Suddenly, Eagles of Death Metal went from unreservedly sympathetic
victims to dangerous provocateurs—in light of the comments, the band was
dropped from multiple French music festivals.
The comments forced me
and other fans of Eagles of Death Metal to re-examine our feelings about the
band. On one hand, what Jesse Hughes claimed was deeply irresponsible, throwing
red meat at those looking to justify, if not weaponize, bigotry and hatred. On
the other hand, why would I expect a guy with whom the entire extent of our
relationship is “he makes some cool guitar riffs I like” to have particularly
refined takes, especially given that he was being asked about hot-button issues
as they related directly to the most traumatic night of his life? This wasn’t,
I concluded, analogous to condemning R. Kelly, a problematic artist who 1. Is
problematic through actions rather than words; 2. Has lyrical content that can
be easily viewed differently given more context about his personal life; 3. Has
absolutely no excuses for his behavior that hold a candle to “I saw 90 people
die at an event that only occurred because of me”.
In the end, I simply
began to view Hughes differently. In the first decade or so of Eagles of Death
Metal, I viewed him as not dissimilar to how I viewed myself: a high school
loner trying to channel his weirdness into a quirky package that could reach
others of a similar persuasion. Following his comments, I began to view Hughes
like an uncle who spends all day posting memes on Facebook about how liberals
want to ban churches and replace them with shrines to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I find the message annoying on a good day and despicable on an average one, but
I’m also rooting for him to see the light. I’ve seen his potential and I don’t
want to see the brain worms of a historically stupid era of evidence-less
conspiracy theories-as-serious discourse corrupt him.
In 2017, Eagles of
Death Metal recorded their first post-Bataclan songs in-studio, kind of. The
band contributed to two above-average pop-rock tracks on Kesha’s acclaimed comeback
album Rainbow, “Let ‘Em Talk” and “Boogie Feet”. The end result,
particularly in the case of the latter, sounded essentially like The Ting
Tings, which was a positive enough outcome, but neither song was written by
Hughes nor Josh Homme and arguably reflected Kesha’s take on what a
collaboration with Eagles of Death Metal should sound like rather than anything
the band itself would have in mind.
But in 2019, the band
returned with its first semi-proper album since 2015 with a left-field
collection of covers, EODM Presents Boots Electric Performing The Best
Songs We Never Wrote. It is simultaneously the most Jesse Hughes-heavy
album (“Boots Electric” is Hughes’s musical pseudonym) and the least promoted
album—the collection was initially a limited release and received so little
attention that it doesn’t even so much as have a Wikipedia page. And yet it
became the album in 2019 that I most wanted to be good. The album, described by
Hughes as therapeutic to record following a bout with depression following the
Paris tragedy, was significant in its very existence and as a battle of sorts
for the soul of Eagles of Death Metal. Were they the same, silly rock band of
yesteryear or had the shooting cost the band its soul?
The album is clunky
both in title and in its oddball mixture of songs. The first three tracks are,
on their surface, an expected trio for a hard rock band’s covers album—KISS’s
“God of Thunder”, Guns N’ Roses’ “It’s So Easy”, and the AC/DC double-punch
“High Voltage/It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock’n’Roll)”. While the
first cover is relatively straightforward, the next track, a cover of the
second track off Appetite for Destruction, sounds like Richard
Cheese impersonating B-52s impersonating GNR, with Hughes and female backing
vocalists goofing their way through it all the way. The AC/DC medley combines
sincerity with camp, with the songs being musically similar to the originals
but with Hughes’s casual vocals highlighting the absurdity of AC/DC’s
cartoonish machismo.
And then the album
starts to venture a bit off the rails. “So Alive” becomes a glam anthem, after
which they attempt a slowed-down rendition of the Ramones’ “Beat on the Brat”.
Next comes a trio of massive pop hits—Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra”, George
Michael’s “Careless Whisper”, and Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair”. Perhaps most
surprising is how relatively faithful to the original these are, aside from the
pronounced female backing vocals in “Abracadabra” and the crunching guitar in
place of saxophone in “Careless Whisper”. Meanwhile, while a cover of Mary J.
Blige from a rock band may sound unusual, it is arguably the most
straightforward cover on the album—Hughes even retains the “let’s get crunk
‘cause Mary’s back” lyric. Normally, I oppose covers this conventional on
studio recordings because why not just listen to the original, but the shock
value of this band doing this song is too jarring to resist.
And given the
conclusions that one could extrapolate about Hughes as a regressive figure,
there’s something refreshing about him covering an openly gay artist in Michael
and a black female artist in Blige, both of whom he has cited in interviews as
among his favorite artists. It is a refreshing reminder in a more general sense
that most great musicians have wide and varied musical influences. While plenty
of fans of EODM’s brand of straightforward rock can be dismissive of pop and
R&B, the artists themselves tend to, at the minimum, respect the greats of
the genres. And George Michael and Mary J. Blige qualify.
Admittedly, the album
starts to lose some steam on the back half. With the exception of a cover of
David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” that sounds like it came out of the 1930s,
there’s nothing especially memorable. But on the whole, this is a solid album.
And most importantly, it is a redemptive album of sorts.
Not that he’s tried
particularly hard to do so, but even if he did, Jesse Hughes is never going to
escape his post-Bataclan comments. One might be tempted to criticize him for
trying to go on about his life as though nothing happened, but by recording an
album that fits squarely within the pre-Paris EODM ethos, he’s ignoring the
attacks themselves, which he is allowed and arguably right to do, in addition
to the backlash. This isn’t the greatest Eagles of Death Metal album—in fact, it’s
arguably my least favorite. It’s a solid album, though it would be a real
stretch to call it the best album of 2019. But it is also, beyond its musical
value, pure catharsis. In a way that transcends its actual quality, it is
probably my favorite album of the year.
Some, particularly
non-fans, may have hoped EODM would emerge with a reflection on their
horrifying experiences and some newfound sense of maturity, but this wouldn’t
have been true to the band’s personality. This isn’t a band merely content with
making big dumb rock—it is a band which revels in it. They aren’t U2. They
aren’t trying to be.
On the day of the
Paris attacks, Eagles of Death Metal’s most played song on Spotify was “Miss
Alissa”, a non-single fan favorite off the band’s only proper album to not
chart in the United States. This perfectly conveyed the band’s status as a band
that existed for the purpose of those who liked them and wasn’t trying to be
everything to everybody. Today, nearly four years later, their most played song
on Spotify is still “Miss Alissa”. As with the band itself, sometimes
it’s comforting to know that some things never change.
