The Next Hundred Years

by Brian Varney

At a time when there is a ridiculous surplus of new releases, even among established and well-respected labels, it’d seem logical that just about any band can find a label gullible enough to release their record. A reasonable person might then conclude that any band who has to release their own record must be really bad. The Next Hundred Years is just the sort of band that proves this theory utterly wrong.

This is a really good record. Yeah, it does sound pretty heavily indebted to Queens of the Stone Age at times, so if that’s gonna bother you, stop reading. I’m personally not all that crazy about QOTSA and I love this record, probably more than I do anything by QOTSA. The Next Hundred Years has that same “robot-rock” sound with heavy emphasis on repetition and plentiful starts and stops, but NHY have Zeb Duggan, who’s a much better singer than Josh Homme, and the fact that he doubles on violin – which manages to make the music both more psychedelic and more melodic – only makes this platter that much more interesting to my ears.

I don’t want to give too much credit to any single member, though, because the success is too cohesive to be anything but a team effort. Take a track like “Kill the Skipper (Kill Yourself),” which starts out with a simple riff that could’ve been swiped from any number of Kyuss tracks, and ends up five-and-half minutes later on what might as well be the other side of the Canadian border, the whole band locked into a completely different kind of trance.
(www.hundredyearsband.com)