Mar 23 2009 3:02 pm,
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
‘It’s Blitz!’
(Polydor)
THERE’S NO GUITARS! THE DRUMS SOUND ELECTRO! KAREN O HAS TWO HEADS!
There’s been so much hysteria surrounding the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album that it’s almost like everyone’s forgotten to mention just how fucking great it is. ‘It’s Blitz!’ is the New York trio’s boldest step forward yet. Stilted second effort ‘Show Your Bones’ sounded like a band deliberately not enjoying themselves – Karen O wasn’t singing “it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to”, but she may as well have been – but here they’re back on party-crashing, attention-grabbing form. That’s not to say that ‘It’s Blitz!’ is without moments of reflection – check out the stunningly glacial ‘Skeletons’ – but the high-tempo songs are the adrenaline-veined accelerations that lay at its heart.
As if pre-empting NoGuitargate, the album opens with a great big fat one stabbing ‘Zero’ into life. True, it’s soon dwarfed by gaping, kaleidoscopic soundscapes but, err, it’s in there somewhere. Only Joe Satriani’ll be bemoaning the lack of axe-wielding going on by the time the chorus kicks in, though – ‘Zero’ is a bona fide dancefloor set-alighter, strutting forward like a robot-age Blondie; when Nick Zinner does finally reintroduce a bit of the ol’ six-string towards the end, it sounds like it’s being wired through Optimus Prime. Space-age synths begin ‘Heads Will Roll’, meanwhile, Karen O oozing cool and barking “Off with your head!/Dance ‘til you’re dead!” like some sort of dancefloor dictator as a Eurythmics disco-stomp envelops her. Its chorus is viciously wicked as intestine-realigning distorto-riffs topple over each other; it’s possibly the best thing they’ve ever done.
Having started off on a pace that not even Usain Bolt could keep up with, they slow things down with the electro beats’n’bleeps of ‘Soft Shock’ hypnotically glide around Karen’s voice and ‘Skeletons’, its slow-building wall of sound building to a cathedral-sized climax. ‘Dull Life’, though, gets the juggernaut juddering again and is the closest thing to old Yeah Yeah Yeahs here, Zinner’s guitar pirouetting round Brian Chase’s hillbilly-stomp and Karen O wrapping her prurient pipes round an impeccably indelible melody. The art-rock riffola might be in short supply on ‘It’s Blitz!’, but you won’t miss it; the strength of Yeah Yeah Yeah’s third album lay in the songs, ten of the best that they’ve ever written. It’s a thrilling record and impossible not to love - unless you’re Joe Satriani, of course…
Niall Doherty
