Queens thunder and brood at Nokia

The smoky whiff of contraband mingled with the Nokia Theatre’s new-car smell on Monday night, giving some pungent validation to Queens of the Stone Age’s rep as “stoner rock.” The band has also been called a metal band, an alternative rock act, or some vague mixture of all three. It’s never been easy to classify, and why should it?

The band’s sound is a distinctive one, built on intense, hypnotic hard-rock patterns played with precision and a touch of swing. It is brooding, slippery and loud, a storm of volume and brutal charisma.

The band emerged Monday to the recorded sounds of Sly & the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music,” a selection certainly designed to emphasize the celebration within the Queens sound.

Its set immediately erupted with “Regular John,” a song of explosive sci-fi riffs that opened the band’s indie debut in 1998, introducing a playful heavy-rock standard for everything else to follow.

From the same album came “You Can’t Quit Me Baby,” as leader Joshua Homme fired off sparks of electric guitar and elegant melody amid crunching noise and the vaguely threatening message to a lover: “You’re solid gold/I’ll see you in hell . . . “

These songs weren’t the radio hits many fans might be most familiar with, but they represent the foundation of whatever Homme has created since, a clear break from his days playing fried Mojave metal in the band Kyuss in the ‘90s. Homme has gone from that scorched teenage wasteland to family and fatherhood closer to Los Angeles and lost none of his edge or inventiveness.

For nearly two hours, Homme and the band demonstrated the possibilities of his expanded view of loudness, noise and melody. There was the frayed, electric shimmer of “In the Fade” (from 2000) and the thunderous “Burn the Witch” (2005), a dark and twisted tune originally recorded by the band with ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons, and which inspired a groaning singalong from the crowd.

The group’s sound has always had Homme at its center, with various hot players coming in and out of the picture.

But in the last few years he’s settled on a formidable core band of guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen and drummer Joey Castillo (who pounded a kit fittingly adorned with the old Black Flag band insignia).

The band recently released the hard-charging new Queens of the Stone Age album, “Era Vulgaris.” At the Nokia, that album’s “3’s & 7’s” strutted to a frantic, excited beat. And “Make It Wit Chu” was leering and droll, a version tougher than the original take released on one of Homme’s “Desert Sessions” recordings. Weird, loud and fun.

Earlier, support act Mastodon offered its own meditative throb, as forward-looking as Kyuss was in its day.

The Atlanta quartet dug deep into the sludge, but was most effective with the more melodic passages. It was heavy and virtuosic, prog without the pretension, and another forceful, unpredictable step in the ongoing metal evolution.