Album Review

Yeah Yeah Yeahs
It’s Blitz!
(Interscope)

The good news is that It’s Blitz! marks a major recovery from
Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ brick of a last album, the deeply disappointing
sophomore slouch Show Your Bones. The bad news is that, despite
a handful of truly killer songs—a few as good as anything the
band has yet done—the album doesn’t quite live up to the
consistent frenzy of debut Fever to Tell. Not that Karen O and
gentlemen are even trying to recapture that record’s youthful racket;
title aside, It’s Blitz! is a relatively relaxed record, about
half of which consists of ballads. Its better half, though, is full of
glitzy, discotheque-ready rock treated by multi-instrumentalist Nick
Zinner with generous doses of drum machine and warm, buzzing
synthesizers where previously there would have been mostly just
squealing hot guitars.

The album leads with a trio of such songs. On the rising, anthemic
“Zero,” Zinner provides bassy synth pulse, Brian Chase drums around
skeletal programmed beats, and Karen O sounds as alluring and sharp as
ever, her tuneful, elastic singing pierced by breathy vocal tics.
“Heads Will Roll” is a perfectly charged disco bloodbath (“Heads will
roll/On the floor”), whose chorus’s triumphant, descending chord
progression suggests that the track’s working title could’ve been “This
Is Not a PiL Song.” “Soft Shock” cools things down a bit before the
album dips into ballad territory with “Skeletons,” the first of two
five-minute-long downers (the other being
“Runaway”).

Between the two are the up-tempo hand-clapping and staccato melody
of “Dull Life” and the long guitar dirgey build of “Shame and Fortune,”
which begs for some kind of explosive release, but just kind of riffs
out and tapers off. Elsewhere, Karen O’s vocals on “Dragon Queen” nod
to Iggy Pop’s narcotic, pub-crawling “Nightclubbing” over a steady
backbeat and a twitching, wiry guitar line. Album closer “Little
Shadow” sweetly douses the band’s campfire and leaves a clean camp. The
best of the album’s back half by far, though, is “Hysteric,” a swell
“Maps” update (i.e., gorgeous balladry well fit for a dance floor
approaching last call) full of twinkling guitar echoes, soft keys, and
Karen O’s heavenly sighs. So, a mixed album, but finally some damn fine
singles again.