Southern California’s Queens of the Stone Age first made their mark on British audiences with their explosively raw blend of classic rock two years ago, proving to be an advance landing party for the garage-punk revivalism of the Strokes and the White Stripes. Inaugurating their latest UK tour, the Queens had clearly made great leaps in professionalism since last year’s breakthrough album Rated R. Indeed, there were times when they almost lived up to their inflated critical reputation.

While the quality and diversity of songs on the band’s current album, Songs for the Deaf, mark a clear step forward, it was their stage presentation which seemed to be in a whole new league on Saturday. Cloaked in shadow for most of the set, strafed by green and purple searchlights, with the volume cranked up to floor-shaking levels, the Queens squeezed every last spark of excitement from even their least distinguished songs.

The band’s main vocalist Josh Homme, who could pass for Eminem’s older brother, stomped and howled through beefy, break-neck readings of cheerily fatalistic album tracks such as Gonna Leave You and No One Knows. On some numbers he handed the microphone to Mark Lanegan, a minor deity in US independent rock circles and a semidetached member of the Queens. His soulful rasp on tunes such as the macabre Hangin’ Tree merely underlined the expressive shortcomings of Homme’s competent but nondescript voice.

With endless lyrics about their notoriously excessive drug habits and doomed relationships, the Queens are not especially original or inspired. But they have perfected a high-octane mix of pop melody with heavy rock delivery, fierce control with explosive abandon, which calls to mind everyone from Black Sabbath to Nirvana. Indeed Songs for the Deaf was recorded with the former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl.

Perhaps the most telling Nirvana parallel is that both bands make a form of heavy metal which appeals to critics and consumers who are too uptight to admit to liking anything as uncool as heavy metal. Which is a smart piece of marketing, since a hefty mid-section of the Cardiff show consisted of crude guitar riffs and meandering solos of such tooth-grinding tedium they could almost have been the work of some Seventies dinosaur act like Uriah Heep. Beneath their shiny surface sheen of semi-ironic cool, the Queens hovered on the edge of extreme dullness.

Climaxing with a riotous version of their anthemic former single, The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret, this was an assured show. The band relied more on pure muscle than emotional depth or subtlety, but such are the perils of making music from rock’s stone age.

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