Karen O, Medicine Woman: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Show Your Bones
Written: Mar 29 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Karen O is equal parts sorceress, fertility idol, and benevolent dictator
Cons: It's all so immediate... will I care a year from now?
The Bottom Line: In which the author plays the part of National Geographic documentarian stumbling upon a complex society of not-so-ancient neo-post-punks.
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| plorentz's Full Review: Show Your Bones by Yeah Yeah Yeahs |
For the artwork of their latest album, Show Your Bones, the neo-post-punk (I may be making this up) trio the Yeah Yeah Yeahs charged fans with making flags for the band; and the varied results of this challenge grace not just the cover - a crudely sown tree image incorporating the band's triple-Y initials - but also most of the booklet as well (and the centerfold anthologizes the often-just-as-elaborate envelopes in which the flags were sent). I mention this because the music of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs sounds very much like what a flag would sound like if flags were music. It's loud and declamatory. It's ritualistic and chant-like. It's a uniter, not a divider. It's even sort of medicinal, and full of not-immediately-explicable symbology that's more intuitive and tribal than rational.
Show Your Bones is heralded by the fiery, mystic anthem "Gold Lion", which comes on like the soundtrack to a virginal sacrifice, Karen O's vocals veering from raw, fertility-goddess swagger on the chorus-like verses (the song is virtually 100% chorus) to the wordless Lene Lovich-style bird noises of the actual chorus chorus where things get progressively more psychedelic and otherworldly - courtesy of some spooky synth-string textures and an operatically squelched guitar descant towards the end. Unlike the band's breakthrough hit "Maps", which was kind of a slow brewer, a song that dug itself into your brain and proceeded to camp out there, parasitically refusing to divulge any of its secrets, "Gold Lion", and indeed, much of this new album feels instantaneous, immediate - now, dammit - and in that sense it may ultimately prove a little less satisfying than their previous record Fever to Tell.
But, in the moment, Yeah Yeah Yeahs offer us little opportunity to ponder any future relationship we might have with their record. Nick Zinner's riffage is tight, unvarnished, and angular in that totally 1978 sorta way, and Brian Chase's rhythmic attack, despite the complex textures he conjures, the delicious triplet patterns and syncopations of songs like the closing "Turn Into" nevertheless sounds so primitive (or maybe what I mean is "primal") at times (or "feral") that its makes Meg White sound like Neil (friggin') Peart.
The songs are redeemed of their undeniable unprettiness only by their striking brevity, their brittle DIY aesthetic, and their strange incantatory power - such that when Karen O repeats a line as resolutely meaningless as "something like a phenomena" (from "Phenomena"), there's a dark magic in the annoying (and, I'm guessing, intentional) grammatical disagreement between article and noun that casts a witchy rock n' roll spell over my Inner English Major, bending him to her nefariously sexual whims. "Honeybear" alternates between its insistently pounded-out (and not-at-all misguided) 4/4 disco aspirations and a chunky roadhouse blues; while "Warrior" evokes the vigilant prayerfulness and militant poetry of early Patti Smith.
In the midst of a pandemic of new bands trying to be the bands that every record store employee obsessed over 25 years ago (present company tending towards an amalgam of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Gang of Four), the Yeah Yeah Yeahs continue to distinguish themselves by their ambition, and the way they synthesize their influences into something new and exciting that goes beyond mere musical name-checking. If Show Your Bones does little to actually advance the band's vision, it most certainly solidifies it and it kicks your butt a few times in the process.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Show Your Bones" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Dress Up / Interscope Records
Released 3/28/06
Produced by David Andrew Sitek and Squeak E. Clean
39 min.
SONGS: Gold Lion - Way Out - Fancy - Phenomena - Honeybear - Cheated Hearts - Dudley - Mysteries - The Sweets - Warrior - Turn Into
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
plorentz
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Member: Paul Lorentz
Location: The Land of Limburger and Leinenkugel's
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