Do not let their name fool you; while the Eagles of Death Metal incorporate many different styles into their latest offering, nowhere on the album is there a hint of Hotel California\ or even a single note resembling anything in the Slayer catalogue.
Death by Sexy, the band's sophomore outing following 2004's Peace Love Death Metal, instead sounds like the test tube creation of an ill-fated chemistry experiment combining The Darkness' mojo, Robert Johnson's grit, Queens of the Stone Age's attitude and Tenacious D's absurdity. With such an impressive pedigree one would expect beginning-to-end greatness, but unfortunately these Eagles never soar to such heights.
A modern-day supergroup in every sense, Eagles features journalist turned singer/guitar hero Jesse ""The Devil"" Hughes doing his best Darkness-esque fake-falsetto, Tim Vanhamel of dEUS assuming supplemental guitar duties, Queens of the Stone Age guitarist/frontman Josh Homme taking a turn behind the drums and Dave Grohl, Jack Black and a host of others jumping in for spoken cameos here and there.
From the demented cackle at the start of the first track to the jovial clapping which closes out the last, it is apparent that these guys are in it for two things: to rock your socks off and to have a good time doing so, and part of the time they succeed at both—because when they nail it, they nail it.
Mid-album gems ""Solid Gold,"" ""Shasta Beast,"" and ""The Ballad of Queen Bee and Baby Duck"" will have you rolling on the floor with laughter and blues-infused ""Bag O' Miracles"" will make you feel like you are jamming on a porch somewhere in the South with Robert Johnson. Standout garage-rockers ""Keep Your Head Up"" and ""Cherry Cola"" will undoubtedly make you want to bust out the ole air guitar and start wailing along. Yet these superb samples of rock set a template that is copied but unmatched by the rest of the album.
As Homme, Grohl, and Black have proven in their various other side projects, ridiculousness—despite being extremely trivial—can be immensely satisfying when it works, yet Sexy never really reaches that level of excitement. The problem is that Eagles never seem to fully commit to the joke. This would be fine had they paid more attention to just rocking out, but instead they go halfway toward both, leaving the listener lost somewhere in the middle. After about the fourth or fifth track, listening to the same drum beat gets extremely stale, and the monotony of the crunchy-distorted guitar kills the merely mildly funny songs. While the six or so songs that work show rock greatness, the other half feel like lame copies packed in to pad out the album.
Ultimately Death by Sexy isn't bad; it just isn't great. For any modern day rock album to have half of its tracks be at least decent is an accomplishment within itself, and it succeeds in that regard. It is just that every time they demonstrate rock superiority, they come back and demonstrate plain old mediocrity.
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