Soft Shock
Posted by: danhartland on: April 7, 2009
It's Blitz!
If we lived in a just world, 2006′s Show Your Bones would have seen the Yeah Yeah Yeahs leap from artrock darlings to global dominators, holding all in their sway with displays of intricate bombast and sly rock rhythms. Alas, the world continues to disappoint, and the album somehow managed to make fewer waves than, the band’s immediate-but-patchy debut, Fever To Tell, and its anthem for angsting youth, ‘Maps’.
The band’s new record, It’s Blitz!, may be a response to that underwhelming reception; it is, in a sense, a change of direction: Nick Zinner’s angular guitars are here replaced with warbling synths, and Brian Chase’s quietly showy drumming finds itself supplemented by programmed beats. The melodies, too, seem changed, smoothed over and pinned down, more suited to their new contexts. Yet this is no dance album, and everything essential about the record remains within that old artrock niche – unpredictable structures, halting hooks, and, of course, Karen O’s arch, unifying vocal.
As always, K.O. represents the focal point of the LP, simultaneously the listener’s peer and priestess. Her lyrics are more gnomic than ever, perhaps reflecting the songs’ hazier form. It’s Blitz! is less a hybrid album as it is a fairly conscious reworking of the band’s vocubulary, however, and it uses that central voice as a largely unchanging guide to the new landscape. To some extent, all this is the sound of a scenester band following the scene, but the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are also cannier than that: It’s Blitz! drags the scene back onto the band’s own turf: ‘Heads Will Roll’ takes 80s revivalism and scrubs it dirty, whilst ‘Dull Life’ takes a Franz riff and refracts it through Zimmer’s sharper prism; and if everything is just that little bit more reserved, even in as simple an act as singing the word ‘crying’, Karen O infuses proceedings with a twist of the untramelled. The band remain one of the most intelligent and compelling acts to trip towards the mainstream.
And that cover’s perfect, too.
2 Responses to "Soft Shock"
[...] post instead. I’m somewhat pained to have to leave out The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ memorable It’s Blitz!, and Magnolia Electric Company, The Decemberists and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy all released [...]
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71 is the number of an apartment we return to regularly in Whinfell Forest, Cumbria. We like it there.
‘We’ are Anna French and Dan Hartland. The Story and the Truth is a sort of inadequate catch-all term for what goes on here: we tend to talk about novels, history, food and fashion, politics and music, but there may also be photographs of soft toys and musicians. Stick around and see.
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Words We Like
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
An astounding work of collecting-as-art, this compendium of 800,000 weird words is easily one of the most consistent genre anthologies I have read. Heterodox yet focused, it is fated to be the canonical text of weird fiction studies for some time to come - and deservedly so. The first-rank stories here - and there are many, not a few - are not excellent weird fiction. They are simply some of the best 20th century writing available in any mode. Not without its faults - but that is, ahem, the nature of the beast. Essential.
Sounds We Like
Sonik Kicks, by Paul Weller
I haven't paid much attention to Weller - an artist who hangs heavy in my musical tutelage - since 2000's Heliocentric, an album of diverse interests which felt like a shot of crisp elegance in that year of Steps and 'N Sync. The records that followed it - particularly Illumination - were enough, however, to make those achievements a distant memory. There have been rumblings of a renaissance - 22 Dreams got great reviews - but only the sounds of Sonik Kicks have brought me back. Energetic, fierce and, best of all, creative, this sounds like a record from a much younger man. Weller has a lesson or two in him yet.
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April 10, 2009 at 9:01 pm
[...] has also been listening to It’s Blitz, the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album. He concludes by saying that they “remain one of the most [...]