Album Review

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It's Blitz

I had feared Yeah Yeah Yeahs were a one-trick pony even before their first album came out. Thankfully they've proven me wrong, though they haven't exactly developed into innovators either. That first album, Fever To Tell, was thrilling in the face of great expectations, and it's a thrill the band haven't quite been able to match in the time since.

It would be tempting to trot out that old cliche, the "mature album," when discussing It's Blitz, except that it was already trotted out a few years for Show Your Bones. Perhaps the more appropriate (and even more dreaded) cliche is the "reinvention album," though that of course doesn't tell the whole story. The story it does tell is about the perils of being a succesful indie rock band in this day and age.

Typically when a band goes into reinvention mode, they downplay their main strength in order to show versatility, almost as an act of defiance. On It's Blitz Nick Zinner's guitar is largely absent, replaced by icy synths and gurgling loops. When the guitar is most prominent, it's usually just chugging along with some power chords. It's a shame, in one sense, because Zinner has shown himself to be one of the most creative guitarists around, but the approach also has its merits, as some tunes do manage to squeeze a higher impact out of their guitar riffs, at least once they finally poke their way through the keyboard washes. Outside of the occasional big riff though, Zinner seems more interested in chiming, Edge-style atmospherics when his guitar does take center stage.

That's not the only strange (and alarming) echo of U2 on the album. The windy ballad Skeletons (bafflingly placed fourth in the running order - but more on sequencing later) has a vaguely Celtic melodic backbone and the kind of dramatic bombast present on latter-day U2 records. Now "bombast" is not necessarily a pejorative. Yeah Yeah Yeahs at their best have a bombastic approach, but it's a scruffy, slightly wild kind of bombast. And as U2/Coldplay/et al. have shown, bombast coupled with melodramatic pathos leads right to MOR piffle. It's a line Yeah Yeah Yeahs flirt dangerously with on a few It's Blitz tracks, fortunately without ever fully crossing over.

The counterintuitive sequencing of the album certainly puts more of the focus on the slow jams. Openers Zero and Heads Will Roll are more or less the same song tackled from different angles, and then comes Soft Shock and the aforementioned Skeletons, which test the patience as number three and four tracks. Not to pick on Skeletons too much, because it's really not bad or anything, but it just has such a last-song-on-an-album feel (and, at over 5 minutes, lenght), it's hard not to get lulled into thinking It's Blitz is coming to a close at track four.

Thankfully things pick up immediately with Dull Life and Shame and Fortune, the album's two best songs placed back to back. And for all my harping on Skeletons, without it I doubt that Dull Life would have the electric shock impact.

The most interesting song is Dragon Queen, which has the same 21st century space-disco vibe as Jimmy from MIA's Kala. If there weren't so many ballads, this song would qualify as the most outside-the-box for Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and it's a much more interesting potential direction for the band to take. Also, Dragon Queen is a pretty great catch-phrase to describe Karen O's onstage persona.

If this all seems too focused on the negative, it's just because the biggest stumbling blocks on the album are the most self-consciously "different," while the highlights are mining safe territory, albeit with bracing effect. But that brings up the Catch-22 for modern bands: stick to your strengths and you'll be chastised for playing it safe, but try to branch out and you'll be criticized for abandoning your strengths. That attitude, perpetuated most egregiously by Pitchfork, ironically only serves to further homogenize the musical landscape, because people are afraid to take risks with their careers, lest they be pilloried for it and lose the chance of having careers at all. A site like Pitchfork is so consumed with annointing instant classics that they've forgotten that musical creation requires trial and error, fits and starts, and sometimes that means falling flat on your face before breaking new ground.

A great example, and quite relevant to Yeah Yeah Yeahs, would be Liars, who made a universally-acclaimed first album, followed it up with a Pitchfork-slandered (and therefore universally-slandered) second album, but one that turned out to be a mere stepping stone en route to the fantastic heights they reached with their third and fourth albums.

With the way things are going, it's unclear how many bands are going to be able to weather that kind of storm. Yeah Yeah Yeahs certainly deserve the chance.