Yeah Yeah Yeahs: It's Blitz! (Part 0 of 1)

I have a hypothetical for youse guys:

Can Karen O. please, please, please stop plagiarising Siouxsie Sioux? I finally got my hands on a copy of Yeah Yeah Yeah's It's Blitz! and, while it is imminently enjoyable and crispy-pan-fried smooth-butter bizarro-pop, everything reads and sounds as though Karen has basically taken all the naughty bits about bondage, LaPortian discussions about bodily functions run afoul, Foucaultian smatterings of punishment and madness, and Paglia-esque animal-woman conflations from Siouxsie's Juju and Kaleidoscope and smashed it together with Tori Amos at her angriest and run it through a P J Harvey irony press.

Granted, none of this detracts from YYY's efforts. In fact, there is something a bit refreshing about the dance-club-cum-Salo attitude Karen portrays through the album. It is a bit unsettling, as it is a strident departure from the sonic worlds of their first two EPs and Fever to Tell, what with all the multilayered mixing and lack of importance in the guitar for the first few tracks. For instance, "Heads Will Roll" starts out with a keyboard chord progression that could easily have been lifted from Superstition or Peepshow. Karen's vocals themselves have calmed down considerably through these six years, and her Byrne-ish tics are far more prevalent, revealed by (assumably) superior recording equipment, and her tone quality has the struggling-contralto, nigh-emphysematic word-ending quirks that Siouxsie has given us during her solo career.

Musically, the densities are almost staggering. "Soft Shock" has no fewer than four separate streams of thought between the vocoded voice, the keyboard (while playing in unison mostly with the vocoded voice in the bridges, the timbre is separate enough to become its own animal), the guitar-distorted-1, the guitar-not-distorted, drums, bass, another guitar, and at last Karen. "Dragon Queen," while a fabulous song which inexorably combines ELO, Thompson Twins, Sheena E, Speaking in Tongues-era TH, and flecks of funk, is burdened with a huge amount of activity. YYYs pull this off, of course, by keeping the layers spare, like a good Henze symphony, and not ultra-complex, like the worst Ferneyhough piece. Many of the songs do, though, become rather blocky. By this, I mean Penderecki: nothing, nothing, THEN SOUND FOREVER, then nothing. Monomorphic. Static recursively through forward motion. Monotemporal. Fixed images with idiosyncratic character for four minutes or so. I have no clue whether this is a benefit or not; ask me in a few weeks, when I'm drunk or sober or sleeping or not.

Granted, Karen's influences are less visible (audible?) to the audience here but there are so many we could choose from. GBV, New Order, TH, PJ Harvey, Patti, the list could go on. But here, she's shoehorning Siouxsie in between all of those. Let me demonstrate: GBV SIOUXSIE New Order SIOUXSIE TalkSIOUXSIEing HeaSIOUXSIEds, PoSIOUXSIElly JeaSIOUXSIEn HarSIOUXSIEveSIOUXSIEy,... one easily gets the idea. "Hysteric" is a great example of this. As is "Skeletons." In the latter, we have a symphonic bass drum, a martial drum-sticking-line, atmospheric and translucent keyboard riffs, and an ethereal voice discussing -- well, esoteric lyrics in unrhymed couplets with a gothic rendition of permanent, unrequited love over a pentatonic wash of synths. (I give you "Softly" from Superstition) In "Hysteric," we have - albeit updated - an ambivalent take on the so-called journey of amor that we have (in customary deprecating and removed way) in Siouxsie's "Ghost in You." The main differences are that Karen is singing over a chord progression that evades the dominant and sings in a Scottish rip rhythm. Hold on: Siouxsie sort of does that too.

Again: the album stands on its own merits, and I owe it a proper review without post-structuralist doddering, and it shall have one soon after I review everything else new and old that, for some reason, I have the urge to discuss or rip apart. Mainly discuss. But I reserve the right...

I do suggest the album gets a proper listen from you, too. It's rather good.

I also say "finally" a bit tongue-in-cheek since it has been out for two months. I do not get to things quickly enough, it seems, but, that happens to be how I roullez le bon-temps.