Artist: Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Album: It's Blitz!
Year: 2009
Grade: 2.5 pretzels
How do you cope when artists change their styles? It’s easy to be reactionary, immediately yelling “foul” when artists don’t release the type of music you expect from them. However, music is always going to be about personal growth on the part of the artist. In order for an artist to move from one style to another, they have to find a way to bring their audience along with them. Radiohead are a glaring example of a band who managed this perfectly. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, though, might have left me behind by releasing It’s Blitz!.
I’m a huge fan of the YYYs 2003 debut album, Fever To Tell. It’s an album with balls. It screams and cries and bleeds all over the floor before finally ripping your heart out with “Maps”. It’s one of the few albums released after 1980 that I feel comfortable calling “punk.” The short, sharp shocks of “Date With The Night” and “Man” will never leave me. However, when YYYs followed Fever To Tell with the much more spacious Show Your Bones, I knew things were changing. The songs got longer and all started to gravitate towards a mid-tempo feel, shedding most of the hyper-kinetic energy I loved about the band in the process. They were quickly becoming a dance band.
It’s Blitz! is the album that completes that evolution. Opening with the razor-wire-disco of “Zero”, the album’s motives are clear: it wants you to stop sitting around like a New York hipster and fucking shake your ass. I understand this part. I understand the band’s desire to move away from their early, spiky sound to something more accessible and friendly. Unfortunately, I have purely selfish motives for wanting them to stay the same. I happen to really like it when they play drunken, spastic rants really, really fast. I like Nick Zinner’s guitar pyrotechnics from the first album. I like it when Karen O spirals so far out of control on a take that her voice becomes a grating screech. These were the things that made me like the band in the first place. On It’s Blitz!, they’ve taken most of them away from me.
Watching the YYYs become this dance-rock hybrid hurts me, because there are already so many bands recording music like that, many of which are doing it better. Of Montreal do it edgier, Hercules And Love Affair do it classier. This leaves YYYs as an “average” band, which is something they certainly aren’t. However, by blunting the cutting edge of their music with disco beats and languid rhythms, they’re becoming just that. On another album, a song like “Heads Will Roll” would follow up on the threat its title poses. Here, it just boogies along harmlessly.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs faced two paths after Fever To Tell: they could have recorded more of the same material, or they could have capitalized on the success of “Maps”. Of course, being intelligent musicians who want to pay the rent, they chose the latter. In doing so, however, they missed the point. “Maps” sounded great because it was the only moment of calm on one of the most tumultuous albums of the 2000s. Take all those other songs away and all you have is a fairly boring ballad. YYYs need the energy to earn their more tender inclinations. On It’s Blitz!, they haven’t found that balance yet.
I’m a huge fan of the YYYs 2003 debut album, Fever To Tell. It’s an album with balls. It screams and cries and bleeds all over the floor before finally ripping your heart out with “Maps”. It’s one of the few albums released after 1980 that I feel comfortable calling “punk.” The short, sharp shocks of “Date With The Night” and “Man” will never leave me. However, when YYYs followed Fever To Tell with the much more spacious Show Your Bones, I knew things were changing. The songs got longer and all started to gravitate towards a mid-tempo feel, shedding most of the hyper-kinetic energy I loved about the band in the process. They were quickly becoming a dance band.
It’s Blitz! is the album that completes that evolution. Opening with the razor-wire-disco of “Zero”, the album’s motives are clear: it wants you to stop sitting around like a New York hipster and fucking shake your ass. I understand this part. I understand the band’s desire to move away from their early, spiky sound to something more accessible and friendly. Unfortunately, I have purely selfish motives for wanting them to stay the same. I happen to really like it when they play drunken, spastic rants really, really fast. I like Nick Zinner’s guitar pyrotechnics from the first album. I like it when Karen O spirals so far out of control on a take that her voice becomes a grating screech. These were the things that made me like the band in the first place. On It’s Blitz!, they’ve taken most of them away from me.
Watching the YYYs become this dance-rock hybrid hurts me, because there are already so many bands recording music like that, many of which are doing it better. Of Montreal do it edgier, Hercules And Love Affair do it classier. This leaves YYYs as an “average” band, which is something they certainly aren’t. However, by blunting the cutting edge of their music with disco beats and languid rhythms, they’re becoming just that. On another album, a song like “Heads Will Roll” would follow up on the threat its title poses. Here, it just boogies along harmlessly.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs faced two paths after Fever To Tell: they could have recorded more of the same material, or they could have capitalized on the success of “Maps”. Of course, being intelligent musicians who want to pay the rent, they chose the latter. In doing so, however, they missed the point. “Maps” sounded great because it was the only moment of calm on one of the most tumultuous albums of the 2000s. Take all those other songs away and all you have is a fairly boring ballad. YYYs need the energy to earn their more tender inclinations. On It’s Blitz!, they haven’t found that balance yet.
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