Yeah Yeah Yeahs
It’s Blitz!
Rating: 3.0
Label: Interscope
new wave keyboards dominate, while Brian Chase’s expressive drumming and Nick Zinner’s roaring guitars are pushed to the back. Yet O’s distinctive voice soars and the song builds to a hit the road/hit the floor tempo, generating the energy of their best songs. Co-produced by fellow Brooklynite TV on the Radio’s David Sitek (who also worked on Fever to Tell), the album is not as immediately grabbing as something like “Date with the Night” or “Maps;” keyboards dominate, several songs are more dance than rock and the strongest songs are often the slowest.
The striking album cover is of a hand breaking an egg, but the album does not have the messiness and destructive impulses of some of the band’s better songs (the band that once shrieked “We’re all gonna burn in hell“seems a long way away). There’s still a swagger to the upbeat songs, like the disco-tinged “Heads will Roll,” in which keyboards shoot out sleek coke mirror keyboard riffs and O exhorts “Off-off-off with your head/ Dance-dance-dance till your dead.” But there’s a maturity and depth present and O is as likely to be vulnerable as ballsy. “Runaway” opens with imperial ballroom piano and then brings in swirling, cinematic strings and O’s hazy vocals. It’s the closest the band gets to an orchestrated power ballad and even sounds a little like “November Rain.” “Hysteric” may be the loveliest and most gentle song Yeah Yeah Yeahs have written, with O cooing the lyrics. The stately and tender “Little Shadow” closes the album on a quiet, introspective note.
It is perhaps unfair and limiting to continually compare Yeah Yeah Yeahs to their debut effort, which now stands as one of the best album of the 2000s, or to their live act, which is both stylish and untamed. One of the important aspects of criticism is confronting your own biases and It’s Blitz! was not necessarily what I expected or hoped for. But it did grow on me, after repeated listens, and represents a new direction for the band, one that seeks more to restore and comfort than charge and provoke. The band is clearly bent on pushing themselves and their audience and It’s Blitz! stands as their warmest, most expansive and most exploratory album. O’s vocals are as strong and supple as ever, displaying an impressive versatility, and the music, if initially less dramatic, is consistently layered and creative. Let’s hope that live show still kills though.
by Lukas Sherman
