I LOVE NY
Written: Mar 29 '09
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Zero
Cons: Hysteric
The Bottom Line: YEAH YEAH YEAHS' eclectic, nostalgic 3rd record
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| silktempest's Full Review: It's Blitz! by Yeah Yeah Yeahs |
YEAH YEAH YEAHS' 3rd studio recording, It's Blitz, sounds as a Big Apple collage of peoples, contexts and moods. You can see the band struggling with the limits, spatial and aesthetic, they find in this never-ending urban landscape. You see some guests and some resemblance to old recordings, too. But there are unexpected left curves and new alleys to be explored. It's Blitz it's not coherent and cohesive in itself, but it makes more sense against the background of growing in the city, by night preferably. Breaking eggs is necessary if one is to survive is a message here, as the sleeve depicts.
As a memorial to NY great bands, from BLONDIE to RAMONES, from VELVET UNDERGROUND to KISS, It's Blitz is an eclectic kaleidoscope, kept together by sheer attitude. Elements of Electro, Indie Rock, Punk and New Wave collide as Karen O keeps her manic yell. Nick Zinner adopts bouncy synthesizers as much as he did guitars before. Brian Chase remains a force of nature to be reckoned.
It's a conservative record, if you count the strategy, but the band remains inventive within its own recombination bungalow. O delves in elaborated siren songs. Zinner broadens his abrasive palette. Chase revives Budgie and other 1980s percussionists' hunger for texture. It's arty more than it's gutsy. It's not new but it's not simply more of the same. A bumpy sideway follows, but usually more interesting than Show Your Bones' coy eclecticism. Once again produced by their hyped friends from TV ON THE RADIO.
Lead single Zero blurs the edges between past and present with an old-school paranoid Zinner synth melody, O doing her best Chrissie Hynde impersonation and Chase pounding like mad. The difference you get to Show Your Bones' lackluster dynamics is a great chorus - O in teasing spitfire mode - as well as the great overlapping of parts, the synths becoming ominous, Chase more aggressive, O more dramatic and charmingly affected, the song ultimately larger than life, as in Broadway. The band reacts to the stressful synergy with a synth melody that strangely, but adequately recalls ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN's The Cutter. It's a surprising counterpoint to the ecstatic O bridges. With a nice distillation of nuyorican space and time in its great video, Zero is a premature nominee for 2009's best song and this band's best since the underrated Deja Vu.
Heads Will Roll sounds a deranged ACE OF BASE (!), divided between 1993 Europop beats and 1988 House melodies. O hilarious vocals are simply impossible to be taken seriously. The throbbing bass and guitars exhaust their fumes behind the polished edges (coming to the forefront during the choruses, which sound like their take on LADY GAGA's Just Dance). You wonder what the band intended to do. Whatever, fun.
Soft Shock is the kind of thing THE CARDIGANS would be doing after listening to Maps - this one is Maps p.2 with a bouncy LOVE OF DIAGRAMS retro synth melody. Between 1980s synths and O crystal-clear lucid vocals, the mid-pace beats top anything in Show Your Bones. A small epic with some nice vocalizes. Indeed a soft shock to listeners. Enhanced by the quasi-Punkish coda.
Skeletons is their cryptic homage to DEAD CAN DANCE - or so to speak. You get Karen O sounding more ALANIS MORRISSETTE than SIOUXSIE, imperturbable to the pace of lilting, sullen Gothic atmospherics. Until a glowing guitar melody borrowed from LOVE & ROCKETS arrives? No, there is an ethereal lead synth melody "overcompensating" for the chorus. There is to say, this is YEAH YEAH YEAHS in their un-rocker post-Punk best. The crashing beats and the woodwind-like synths confer an elegiac mood to an otherwise Indie reflection - mirroring their influences from the 1970s and 1980s more than the band could possibly have intended to. This is their most overtly "serious" artistic statement.
Dull Life keeps the mid-1980s mood, this time closer to THE SISTERS OF MERCY, with strangled melodies and lost pianos thrown in the middle. That is, for 30 seconds. Then we have a frantic Pop tune, maybe from DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS, with Latin and otherwise percussion played in Punkish fashion, frantic Indie guitar (yes, back to guitars) melodies trending subtlety out of the water. Like a cartoon crooner, O becomes a stereotype, but her vocals remain crystal-clear, if zany, indulging in funny mess. This one is somewhere between the beauty and the beast. One of the silliest pieces of music YEAH YEAH YEAHS ever put on paper, but you can see more FRANK ZAPPA than Indie comedians in the mix. Older guys.
After a brief and winding first half, with a little bit of everything for you to come to terms with your YEAH YEAH YEAHS pre-conceptions, you get a slower second half, with ruminations, informal tributes and oddballs. A straight departure from YYY's days of Bang and Art Punk chaos, the second half is their mainstream attempt on "respectable" music from growing NY musicians. With plenty of nostalgia.
A mysterious Electro romp, with low cymbals and vamp vocals from stray cat O, is the sexiest stuff this band records this side of...Anything else. Shame and Fortune is also a solid Indie number, with gloved fist riffs, stupid but effective lyrics, great percussion with texture, deranged guitar "solos" (Hawaiian music from Mars). They developed their gutsy side to include other pleasures. As if THE CRAMPS were an Art Punk band.
Runaway, a retro title, is another unexpected grower. With THE BIRD & THE BEES' pianist and O applying for Jazz Diva, exchanging streets for smoky clubs. It is all but Art Punk. This mellow number, with its moody piano licks and kitchen-sink vocals, resembles a torch song, but there's more texture than purpose, more John Cale-like cellos than Big Band arrangements. It's Indie Rock seeking "respectability". The band has the guts and the requisites, but they don't really want to adopt older frameworks, they favor form over substance for the sake of "growing up". They mean a pretty, affected love song for retro rockers. Take it as their Emo song, even though the carnival of synths' coda is decent enough. NY is a strange, affecting, charming city.
Dragon Queen, their tribute to BLONDIE (streamlined guitars, sexy vocals and bouncy synths), TALKING HEADS (percussive World Music from NY Art students) and AFRIKA BAMBATAA (Planet Rock-like subdued melody) is played professionally. TV ON THE RADIO vocalist and guitarist provide decent support. But the odd thing is, YYY doesn't improve on the influences (like, say, VAMPIRE WEEKEND does occasionally), they just throw them altogether - to the point of not sounding like YYY, but like an early 1980s cover band (or THE CARDIGANS again, without Swedish sense of humor). This living museum is a curious offshoot from the late 1970s-early 1980s that, for its resemblance, puts into doubts both YYY and TV ON THE RADIO innovative credentials. Are they just accomplished fans? I wonder what DAVID BOWIE though of this kind of nostalgic recombination. But this may become a hit in retroactive 2009.
Another Maps counterpart arrives in the guise of Hysteric - which, indeed, it is not much. The meditative tone of most Show Your Bones tunes, with pretty (but undistinguished) guitars and COCTEAU TWINS' embracing vocals (but you can sort the lyrics and, of course, O is no match for Elizabeth Frazer), brings familiarity to this Indie Pop tune from formerly abrasive rock-shockers. It's a little too fluffy and reliant on atmosphere to count as a major step forward, but it shows YYY bearing more than a passable resemblance to British post-Punk from the 1980s. There's even a sax cameo! But if they never lived past 1989, they would have been relegated to a 1980s footnotes instead of being a (vibrant?) 21st century band.
Little Shadow is another surprising mainstream tune, Maps once again rearing its depressive head over YYY, somewhere between Runaway's Jazz obsession and BELLE & SEBASTIAN's detailed classicism. O bears a beautiful voice, filled with shades and textures and the remainder play a little bit too folksy, with a string quartet and a pianist once again called to provide the adequate background. As if O was starting her solo career challenging NIGHTWISH - OK, SIXPENCE NONE THE RICHER. The grandiose sequences of New Age synths, shimmering guitars floating on clouds of boredom and O delving on her inner dwellings is something 99 out of 100 YYY fans would never expect, until...It's Blitz. It's far from a masterpiece or "growing up", it sounds YYY from Ireland. As part of the Big Apple landscape. Karen O gets bigger than the band but smaller than her influences. There's more than a fair share of circularity and tautology going on, but some day the girl will push through the boundaries of what she wants to be. She has already left her older persona behind. Take the next step, O. See ya.
File under: YEAH YEAH YEAHS moving (at all?)
Related reviews:
Is Is by YEAH YEAH YEAHS
Show Your Bones by YEAH YEAH YEAHS
Yeah Yeah Yeahs by YEAH YEAH YEAHS
Love of Diagrams by LOVE OF DIAGRAMS
Day & Age by THE KILLERS
Vampire Weekend by VAMPIRE WEEKEND
I Am…Sasha Fierce by BEYONCE
Dig Out Your Soul by OASIS
Tracklist:
* * * * 1/2 Zero
* * * 1/2 Heads Will Roll
* * * * Soft Shock
* * * * Skeletons
* * * 1/2 Dull Life
* * * * Shame and Fortune
* * * 1/2 Runaway
* * * * Dragon Queen
* * * Hysteric
* * * 1/2 Little Shadow
Recommended:
Yes
Great Music to Play While: Getting ready to go out
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silktempest
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