It’s hard to decide what’s most exciting about Them Crooked Vultures. It could be that they are possibly the biggest supergroup since CSNY (or at least since Mike Watt’s wrestling record band). It could simply be that this is an opportunity to see John Paul freaking Jones live on stage. It very well could be the fact that Dave Grohl has returned to the drumkit full time for the first time since Queens Of The Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf. Most likely, however, it’s that Them Crooked Vultures are literally Led Zeppelin meets Kyuss meets Nirvana — and that’s not just some clever music critic comparison.

But when the band takes the stage at the Sound Academy on Friday night, the most exciting thing is that everyone who ponied up the $70-plus gets to hear what Grohl, Jones and Josh Homme have cooked up, long before their debut album has even leaked to the internet.

Opening with a song known thus far as “Elephants,” this holy trinity of rock isn’t afraid to stack the deck with riff after riff as the slow blues groove of the intro quickly shifts gears into an up-tempo jam before settling in for a mid-paced bludgeon. One of the forthcoming album’s teaser tracks, “Scumbag Blues” is a perfect example of the band’s penchant for absolutely punchy rock — which in this case is shot through with barbed lead lines from touring guitarist Alain Johannes and Homme’s disarming falsetto.

Most of the songs would sound at home on a QOTSA disc, and not just because Homme is on lead vocal duty. There’s a healthy reliance on the pentatonic blues scale which allows for a number of jammy breakdowns, though the occasional instrumental meandering is far too muscular for TCV to be mistaken for a jam band. These moments, and even the few mediocre songs (“Caligulove” for example) are about a thousand times more exciting thanks to Grohl’s relentless pounding and an unabashed love for simultaneously killing both of his crash cymbals. Holding the whole enterprise together, however, is none other than Mr. Zeppelin himself — and Jones does so whether he’s playing a four-, eight- or 12-string bass, adding Doors-style organ solos or even playing a strange slide bass contraption. (Seriously, he’s travelling with more gear than the rest of the band combined.)

A seemingly endless jam on the sludgiest of sludge-blues riffs during show closer “Warsaw” only serves to leave the crowd very, very hungry for more music. But at just under 90 minutes, I’d say that Them Crooked Vultures dished out a pretty healthy ration of rock for a band that hasn’t yet released an album. While not all of the songs could be counted among the most memorable nuggets in music history, there’s no shortage of fist-pumping, car-speaker shredding, neighbour-baiting rawk. To sum up, we may as well just borrow the most oft-heard phrase from my fellow concertgoers: “Fuck Yeah!”