10 Perfect Rock Concept Albums
9. Songs for the Deaf - Queens of the Stone Age
Most of the time, you don't need to think that hard when it comes to stoner rock. If you listen to anything from Kyuss or early Queens of the Stone Age, the music almost seems like a soundtrack to your buzz half the time, taking the bare minimum for riffs and creating something so chunky that you can sustain your high much longer than you could imagine. And when Joshua Homme was writing his masterpiece, the high was going to sustain you for an hour long drive through the desert.
Operating like a radio station across its runtime, Songs for the Deaf feels like getting a little piece of every stripe of Queens' sound, as the radio frequencies get disrupted every now and again through different skits. As the stations change, you get some hits like Go With the Flow and No One Knows alongside some much more heavy sounding songs like First It Giveth and Six Shooter.
Since this is rolling through California, you also get a good sense of where you are during the album, like the broad landscape of the desert creeping up on The Sky Is Fallin and the mix getting more and more grainy as you start to lose contact on the back half of the record. By the time you reach Mosquito Song, there's no hope for sanity, being along for the ride and at death's door once you finally settle down at Rancho De La Luna. It might be the last one you'll ever have, but you can't say it hasn't been a good night.