Zinner Bound, Gagged by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
by Zach Huff – A&SB Contributor
Have you ever stayed awake at night, staring at the slowly rotating ceiling fan blades above (or empty ceiling, should you be fan-less) while wondering, “What would a Yeah Yeah Yeahs album sound like if Karen O and Brian Chase decided beat down the guitar-driven awesomeness that is Nick Zinner’s overbearing guitar prowess, likely through the use of baseball bats and lots of rope?”
Well, lie awake no rore.
It’s Blitz! has finally been released, and allegedly it’s totally a “dance rock” album. How’s that? They replaced most of the guitars with synths. Or at least that’s why I think people are touting it as a dance rock album.
To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s a dance rock album… because it isn’t. I mean, I don’t think it is.
The album does start with a few songs that can kinda be considered dance-y. Lead single Zero has a whole lot of blips and quasi-industrial sounds and rhythms going on that illicit the feeling of awkward underground goth clubs (you know, like the one from the first Matrix movie). Heads Will Roll hits with the synths hard, and Chase’s live drums play around with the drum machine beats to force your feet to tap, if not get up and move you around with whatever dancing skills you may possess.
The dance argument can also be made for Dragon Queen, which feels like the love child of Air and Hiroshima (the band, not the city). It certainly has a swagger to it that someone could silkily grind against your crotch to at a dark dance club. I’m sure there’d be lots of foam there.
But beyond that, I don’t know what to really consider the rest of the album. Other than “not dance rock.” It’s a new genre, about to blow up all over the hip blogs…
Shame and Fortune feels like a track that could have come off of Fever to Tell, with Zinner’s complex guitar hooks ripped out, stabbed with sharp implements of musical molestation and flimsily thrown back in. Skeletons and Runaway are almost uncomfortably slow. They work well on their own, but looking at the album as a whole… it’s equivalent to throwing on a Climax record in the middle of a techno set. And no one wants to hear Precious and Few while dripping sweat on the dance floor.
Soft Shock takes the better parts of light synth pop circa 1985, dirtying things up and replacing the high pitched male vocals in the style of, say, a-ha’s Morten Harket, for Karen O’s sultry vocals that seem to soar and hit lows at the same time. The drumming is fantastic, little changes and flicks thrown into the constant low-key-yet-awesome rhythm. And Zinner’s guitars? Kept to the same Asian hook that swirls in and about from time to time. It’s not quite dancy, but it certainly pops like nobody’s business.
So yeah. The new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album is not terrible. It’s far from that. It’s fantastic, and certainly worth a listen if not several thousand of them.
It’s very different from their previous works; the transition from Fever to Tell and Show Your Bones was much more of a “soft shock” (ha!) than from Bones to It’s Blitz!, and that’s fine. It’s nice to see the band mixing things up, treading new waters and whatever other metaphor one can thing of for trying something different.
But please… untie Zinner and let him do his thing on the guitar again.
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