Do you think last time we fell more in love with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or the idea of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? They were immediately exciting, weren’t they. A breath of fresh crackling electric, all angular studded riffs that sounded like they’d only just pierced Nick Zinner’s cranium like a lightening bolt seconds earlier, eccentric vocal outpourings going off like a faulty paintball pellet gun, arty poses struck like mannequins in rock’s window display, all wrapped up in clothes salvaged from the New York kaleidoscope massacre. They were like an old-school episode of Batman with all the live action left on the cutting room floor – just stacks of ‘KAPOWWW!’ and ‘ZIP-BANG!’ all the way to the pleasure bank. It was enough to make all sorts of things stand on end.
But going back to ‘Fever To Tell’ prior to the release of the sophomore ‘Show Your Bones’, it’s not quite the album we remember it being. It’s easy to see how in the thrust of excitement, driven by context and hype and hung off signature tunes like ‘Y Control’, ‘Date With The Night’ and the delicate, peerless ‘Maps’, it turned into the worldwide phenomenon that we now know it as. But there are holes and frayed ends that it would be lazy to attribute to deliberate style choices and lo-fi worthiness. Of course we were in love/lust with the idea, we’re not dead inside, but as fine a record as it is, it would be a shame if it had to represent their memory entirely. Not that you should worry too much about that, because look what they did next.
You can tell that something is different this time merely from what Karen O is modelling in the inlay. Sombre and black from head to toe, with sensible retro fringe? Surely not? Oh, surely so. There is still some kind of customised aspect to her boots, mind – phew! What this represents in this new context is subtlety (indeed, subtlety – even when the guitars are turned up), a command of reserve and mastery of their realm. There seems to have been a realisation that if one isn’t grabbed roughly by the throat the moment they walk through the door, that doesn’t mean they won’t be convinced to stay. And even if you compare and contrast with their striking debut EP the appeal isn’t so different now, other than that they have suddenly become very good indeed at finishing the job off.
Everything we understand about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is still there, it’s not even that it’s turned down in the monitors. Take the juddering Siouxsie Siouxesque convulses in ‘Way Out’ and ‘Honeybear’, Zinner’s recognizably jerky riffing in opening track ‘Gold Lion’ and ‘Mysteries’ and Karen O’s complimentary shrieking in at least the latter instance. But then consider for a minute how they’ve blown those basic fragments up into an impossibly pure pop song (their best ever) in ‘Cheated Hearts’, have Interpol and Blondie between the sheets on ‘Dudley’ and take country rock to the cleaners on the thrillingly climatic ‘Turn Into’. There is a surprising amount of acoustic guitar spilling all over this record, but far from that being a sign of them going soft it’s a mark of versatility and Nick Zinner’s rising star. As far as iconic status goes, how about duelling through alt-rock’s recent history with Jack White, Josh Homme and Joey Santiago?
As they declared originally in ‘Bang’, the inimitable lead track from their debut EP, “the bigger, the better”. This is off the scale.