Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Label: Polydor Records
Released: 2013
Length: 47:35
Rating: 4.5/5
When the talk turns to alternative rock with a distinctly fresh musical character, a universal one-of-a-kind, it’s getting harder and harder these days to dig through the bands of the younger generation.. Yeah Yeah Yeahs are one of them. They burst onto the scene at the start of the new millennium together with The Strokes and White Stripes. White Stripes have long been gone, and The Strokes have settled comfortably into artistic standstill. Of the three, though, you can’t say the same about Yeah Yeah Yaehs. Their fourth album in ten years, »Mosquito«, is once again different from everything we’ve heard from this band. Given the musically challenging flexibility and the big impact of its ambitiously mapped-out arrangements, you could argue that with »Mosquito« Yeah Yeah Yeahs may well be closing their evolutionary circle.. What’s more. With »Mosquito« Yeah Yeah Yeahs find themselves at a turning point. From here on, only art can remain, while punk vanishes completely. We’ll see what the future brings.
A strong alt-rock backbone, topped off with a refined feel for sonic experimentation, sends the darkest album of the band’s career so far onto the stage. Definitely an album that’s honestly weighed down by every phobia imaginable of singer Karen O. Or maybe this time it’s only her alter ego speaking out loud, the one staged on the album’s grotesque cover. A giant mosquito. Whatever. The album is hugely entertaining. The more you listen to it, the more fun it gets, and it crawls under your skin deeper and deeper. With every listen the power of the art component reaches further and further into the listener, knocking cockily on every hidden corner of their soul. Subtle, slow, yet unstoppable. The clear art premise of this record is held in check by its sheer structural variety, which gives it the big conceptual diversity of a successful sonic experiment. Only a few songs start from a similar arrangement mold, even though the recognizable creative art character of this trio runs through all of them.
For the new album, Yeah Yeah Yeahs once again boarded the New York underground. Exactly where their sound comes from. From the little underground studio in the big city that also gave birth to the band’s celebrated debut »Fever To Tell« from 2003. Even the titles of Subway and Under the Earth hint at it, but their musical content is mixed up differently and is a prime example of the band’s artistic maturing. Subway uses sampling to mimic the echo of a metro train rolling along the rails, and the song radiates alienation and pronounced coldness; the next one, Under the Earth, is no less alienated and downright claustrophobic, with the influences of eighties post-punk (The Cure) coming through. Under The Earth carries reggae rhythm patterns in its rhythmic subtext, masterfully compacting the song’s solid rhythmic figure, over which arches a dreamy, hypnotic melody weighed down with melancholy.
Always and Wedding Song carry that moment of a cerebral journey, in their overall calm of drifting through a sampled soundscape, which is now and then torn by the sonic “pecking” of minimalist electric guitar. These two songs have sensible compositional parallels with Maps from the album »Fever to Tell«. The opener Sacrilege carried over some of that “glittering disco theater” that the previous album »Its a Blitz!« (2009) was full of. In that respect, the predecessor to »Mosquito« should have been a commercial success, but that didn’t happen. Gold status with 100,000 copies sold in the UK is poor consolation when you compare those figures with the band’s debut. But that doesn’t even matter, as long as you’ve got an open mind, head and ears. Besides, the drop in CD sales is general, and in that respect these numbers come as no surprise at all. Not to wander off too far, apart from Sacrilege the only other song with a similar moment is Burried Alive.
As the album opener, Sacrilege delivers, as expected, a solid dance rhythm groove, over which arches the frenzied, hysterical vocal of Karen O, while the guitar and sampled sound effects, with tightly handled tricks of art minimalism, effectively fill out the soundscape. In its structure and energy the song instantly grabs the listener’s attention, and its development gets especially interesting in the finale, where the band masterfully fuses two seemingly incompatible genres. In the closing stretch the song takes on a gospel-punk flavor. The album’s conceptual multifacetedness, the fruit of complete creative freedom from any expectations about whether the record will be a commercial success or not, is deepened by the title track, the absolute oddball of the album. Karen O attacks with a vocal further weighed down by genuine punk fury, and her deeply lived-in delivery breathes elements of vulgarity, bizarreness and marginality into the song, and if she hadn’t earlier, Karen O has right here in the title track granted personal citizenship to all the fears that her subconscious presses down and that run through this album.
Area 52 is an interesting hybrid between the old-school New York punk rock primacy of The Stooges, effectively spiked with a space rock component. The “alien-ness” that has always been part of the band’s character has Nick Zinner as its main player here. The cerebral, hypnotic moment of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ psychedelia is present on »Mosquito« too, only it manifests even more maturely and more defined than it once did. Sometimes it’s more obvious (Area 52), sometimes less (Burried Alive). Throughout, though, it’s an important building block of a whole bunch of varied moods that are typical only of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ own expressive character. And with »Mosquito« the band has carried that forward to a new point of its own artistry, the richest in content so far. All the more interesting, then, to watch where Yeah Yeah Yeahs will soar artistically with their next album.
Lineup
Karen O – vocals, bass guitar, keyboards
Nick Zinner – guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, backing vocals, mixing
Brian Chase – drums, percussion, backing vocals
GUEST MUSICIAN:
Dr. Octagon – vocals on track no. 8.
Production
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Tracklist
1. Sacrilege
2. Subway
3. Mosquito
4. Under the Earth
5. Slave
6. These Paths
7. Area 52
8. Buried Alive [ft. Dr. Octagon]
9. Always
10. Despair
11. Wedding Song
