Queens Of The Stone Age – ‘Alive In The Catacombs’ review: moving and meditative concert doc

“This place, it’s like trying to run on a sheet of ice,” says Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, stunned by the subterranean silence of the Paris Catacombs. “You have no idea how much time has passed up there, up above, and no time has passed below. It’s the same time, all the time, every time.”

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He’s not wrong. So immersive is the California rockers’ starkly beautiful Thomas Rames-directed and Blogothèque-produced half-hour live film Alive In The Catacombs, that it’s easy to get lost – as you might while navigating the tunnels and ossuaries beneath the French capital. What’s more, this ain’t no standard stripped-back Live Lounge kinda affair. Homme and co are aided by a supporting cast of six million souls whose skulls line the walls.

As guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen puts it in the accompanying Alive In Paris And Before documentary (by QOTSA’s longtime visual collaborator Andreas Neumann), the band are not the main characters for once. They’re here to compliment and show deference to these people buried 20 metres underground in 1786.

A more ghostly reimagining of ‘Paper Machete’ leads the procession, before ‘Kalopsia’ rings all the more macabre. ‘Villains Of Circumstance’s attack on “life in pursuit of a nameless prey” seems all the more profound when literally staring death in the face. As the band rattle chains and wander the tunnels for ‘Suture Up Your Future’ and promise “when you say it’s dead and gone, yes, I know you’re wrong” on ‘I Never Came’, the beautiful and tender capture of this performance seems to humbly say, “you ain’t all that, we’ll all be bones eventually, but art is forever”.

Alive In The Catacombs may be powerful enough alone, but it hits differently when followed by Neumann’s companion doc. It’s explained that the grisly performance has been 20 years in the planning, though only came to fruition when Homme was at death’s door himself. Alive In Paris And Before begins with last summer’s European tour – including the story of Homme’s “medical emergency” and cancer battle (he’s since had the all-clear).

Bonding with his son and vowing to fight on, Homme pushes through yet another show and on to Paris. “I’m just thinking about Josh, my brother that I want to be OK and I want to be healthy,” says bassist Mikey Shuman in between takes. “I can hear the pain he’s in, and it fucking kills me”.

We can see it too. After this, the band would strike all dates from the diary for Homme’s surgery. First, though, they lay down something special – the songs speaking to the fragility of life and value of perseverance. As Homme simply puts it in his few words spoken between tracks: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

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