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Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz!
| Pitchfork |
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The cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' debut LP, 2003's Fever to Tell, set an early-decade benchmark for sheer ugliness, a deliberately heinous splatter of webbed blood, stabbed snakes, and flaming heads. The music was also confrontational, with lead singer Karen O following in the footsteps of countless riot grrls and righteous rock queens in crafting a persona of raw defiance and sexual menace. Fast-forward six years, and a glance at the instantly iconic cover of the band's third full-length, It's Blitz!, tells you all you need to know about how far the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have come, from Fever to Tell through the middle-ground growing pains of 2006's Show Your Bones and up to today. A clean, simple image of a woman's hand bursting an egg-- it's no less powerful an indication of feminine strength and defiance than Fever's abrasive scrawl, yet it's miles and miles more subversive. It's also a fitting symbol for its music, taking familiar shapes and tools and recombining them in ways that are bracing and unexpected. It's Blitz! is constructed from parts that by themselves aren't extraordinary-- in fact, many of them are quite banal, like the generic Franz-Bloc-Killers modern rock riff that propels "Dull Life" or the doomy one that drives "Shame and Fortune", sounding ripped straight off a late-period Smashing Pumpkins record. Much has been made of the album's heavy reliance on rock's eternal bugaboo, the synth, but often the synths are doing rock things rather than dance things, like on the buzzing, road-burning opener "Zero". Only two songs, "Heads Will Roll" and "Dragon Queen", deliver real disco backbeats....full text |
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| Guardian |
| yappy frontwoman Karen O sounds like an imperious 12-year-old. But then comes the chorus with its glacial 70s synths, and she suddenly bursts into life. "Off, off, off with your head!/ Dance, dance, dance till you're dead!" she booms, and it justifies her indie-icon status like nothing else she's ever done. No other track on It's Blitz! surpasses that 10 seconds, but the band's glittery new disco sound suits them very well. It's all cool, brittle catchiness, with a debt owed to Eat to the Beat-era Blondie - something they partially repay through the album's euphoric twin peaks, Zero and Hysteric. Karen O's froideur carries even lesser songs, such as Skeletons' formulaic new wave, and imbues the ballad Little Shadow with the majesty of an ice queen. Great stuff....full text |
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| Culturebully |
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Brooklyn art-rock trio Yeah Yeah Yeahs broke out in 2003, when it seemed everything coming out of NYC was hailed the next big thing; the Strokes, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the Bravery and other “garage rock revivalists.” Their major label debut, 2003’s Fever To Tell, was quite a skillful, boisterous affair inspired by early Sonic Youth, yet it produced a bona fide hit in the indie lullaby “Maps,” and further pushed charismatic lead singer Karen O. toward becoming a music/fashion icon. The follow-up, 2006’s Show Your Bones, was mostly a letdown despite “Gold Lion,” while the following Is Is EP seemed to please their fan base. At their core, Yeah Yeah Yeahs are a guitar-based band, but it appears that with It’s Blitz! the band is effected by the new sound in indie, where beats and loops loom over heavy drum programming. The new record, produced by Nick Launay and TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, carries the band closer to the sound of the streets of Brooklyn, er… Williamsburg, where Santigold meets Grace Jones and everyone is nightclubbing. While Karen O. isn’t making any grand statements, her songs swing with a melancholy new swagger, while being a bit less bombastic in its delivery and sonic assault. The influences of both Blondie and Berlin are pretty obvious....full text |
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