When Jenny Lewis took her first steps away from Rilo Kiley, she had the Watson Twins as a sonic compass to help guide her through uncharted waters. It was an interesting new direction for the former child TV star, but ultimately lacked focus and ended up a bit muddy. Many, myself included, have really been looking forward to hearing what she’d do all on her own.

Acid Tongue was recorded mainly live over just three weeks in Van Nuys, CA, and produced by Johnathan Rice, the knob-twister on Rilo Kiley’s most recent LP, 2007’s Under The Blacklight (he’s also her boyfriend). Acid doesn’t possess nearly the same polished shine as Blacklight (an entirely intentional move), but through the more stripped, grittier delivery fans will find familiar ground in Lewis’ clever little lost-love meditations and meanderings. There’s just a lot more stompin’ going on.

Queens Of The Stone Age lost a very close personal friend on July 2nd. Natasha Shneider, from the band Eleven, died of cancer. She had joined QOTSA along with partner Alain Johannes for most (if not all) of the Lullabies To Paralyze tours, and showed up on many a Queens song, and many a Desert Sessions song. She was a beautiful woman, and a talented musician, who likely appears on more than one album you consider among your favorites of all time if you’re a regular here.

So Homme and Queens Of The Stone Age organized a concert to celebrate her life, inviting all of her friends; All proceeds to go to the Natasha Shneider Memorial Fund. Tickets were $100 each, and the event sold out.

Last month, I had a few not entirely coherent things to say about the leaked cuts from Scarlett Johansson’s Tom Waits tribute album, Anywhere I Lay My Head. And ultimately, I had no idea what to make of it.

So the album dropped on Tuesday, and while I had it in hand last weekend, I had to wait through a brief addiction to the new Death Cab For Cutie before I could get around to listening to it in its entirety to try and get a better idea of what the fuck to file it under.

Read on for our honest track-by-track review.

I’m sure most of our visitors ask this question. It’s a little hard to tell right now, I know. It’s because we’re new, and honestly, we haven’t quite decided yet. For now, it’s just me and a couple smart, ballsy friends, writing about whatever inspires us. We’re trying to ask questions that haven’t been asked, and answer questions that haven’t been answered. We’re trying to do interviews with interesting people, and we’re trying to challenge things that we feel people shouldn’t take for granted.

Antiquiet: How much of yourself did you put into the lyrics?
Billy Howerdel: If there’s a story to a song, a lot of times I took something that might be emotionally charging me, and what I would say, or if there’s a misunderstanding and someone had the wrong idea behind your intentions, I kind of ran with that. Even if it was in a sarcastic way, just running with that theme. I wrote Enemies from the point of view of a friend of mine that I haven’t talked to in twenty years, what that guy would think coming back seeing old friends of his and not letting them let go of the past. There’s kind of a recurring theme of people never letting you change. You get a couple fresh starts in life, and one of ‘em is graduating high school, moving on going to college or whatever you’re going to do. You can change your name if you want to, cut your hair, but if you go back and revisit those old places, the past doesn’t forget about you. You can have some shit resurface that you thought you’d lived down. I pretty much wrote it from the story of Frankenstein, as well as this guy that I grew up with. (laughs) But every line in that song is a conversation that I’ve had with somebody else…