The best driving music is hard, heavy, and fast. It gets you speeding tickets. It makes you drum on the steering wheel and cross the center line. While Josh Homme, Queens of the Stone Age’s “red-haired Elvis,”, attributes the term “driving music” to the band’s 1998 self-titled début album, nothing gets the fuel flowing like 2002’s Songs for the Deaf.

The loose concept within the album supposedly takes listeners on a drive from the Mojave Desert to Los Angeles, tuning in and out of radio stations along the way. Fake radio DJs such as “Elastic Ass” in Chino Hills, Calif., tie the songs together as it becomes apparent that the band has some serious diversity and mental instabilities.

The fictional DJs provide nice comic relief to an album that is as lyrically heavy as it is musically. Metaphysically disturbed delusions surface at times, such as track 11, “God is in the Radio.” Such themes are almost to be expected, because Songs for the Deaf takes place after several of the famous and mushroom-filled “Desert Sessions” that Homme and others held.

While certain songs on the album might induce a paranoid episode, it’s only a matter of time until one gets smacked in the head with a 100-pound riff. Songs for the Deaf will knock some rocking nonsense back into listeners’ skulls.

— by Ryan Fosmark