Them Crooked Vultures @ Corn Exchange, 15 Dec

Josh Homme embraces an expectant crowd consisting of – let’s not fool ourselves now – curious Queens, Foos and Zeppelin fans like he’s long overdue a pint with old friends. “How’ve you been?” he booms, “tell everybody I said hey.” Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones, meanwhile, are happy with their heads down doing their damndest to justify Them Crooked Vultures’ status as the supergroup du jour.

Grohl drives the tempo characteristically hard through eastern tinted grooves, reaching a climax of sorts when Bandoliers breaks down to an operatic crescendo, mirroring Homme’s brief stint with desert rock overlords Master of Reality more than anything he;'s done with his day job. For that matter, the sceptics who have dismissed the Vultures as being little more than the newest incarnation of Queens of the Stone Age are urged to reconsider when JPJ makes a keytar look badass for the first time since Roddy Bottum rocked The Real Thing and Homme pulls off ‘lounge crooner’ to the bossa nova beat of Interlude With Ludes’ deranged, peyote-laced sway.

There’s no Feel Good Hit of the Summer, no Negative Creep and no Stairway (denied!) on show, but tripped out jams like Warsaw – tonight’s indelible finale – is proof enough that this is a band quite capable of mass producing its own classics on its own terms.