If we are going to be honest with ourselves here, Yeah Yeah Yeahs were always a singles band. How many of you can honestly say that you still listen to Fever To Tell start to finish? How many of you usually just skip to Maps before going to Show Your Bones to play Gold Lion? Thought so.
With this in mind, the band recruited demigod James Murphy to help produce their forth LP, Mosquito, matching one of the coolest bands to come out of New York in the last ten years with Mr. New York, the best producer the city has perhaps ever cultivated.
Naming their album after the most infuriating living beast on Earth – even David Attenborough hates the fucking little twats – Sacrilege opens with Karen’s go-to juxtaposition with a sweet and sultry vocal line interjected with her trademark scream. The song from there goes unexpectedly gospel, with handclaps and a choral solo bellowing the title of the song.
Subway click clacks with the percussive noise of the New York railway on a song that proves Karen O is at her sweetest when she isn’t trying as hard, her softness can be utterly disarming. Under The Earth similarly breaks from the usual mould of Karen unleashing the inner demon whilst the title track is custom made for live performance with the chorus lyric, ‘I’ll suck your blood’ sounding as perversely sexual as Karen meant it to be.
In the past, one detraction of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is that they were a band sometimes too preoccupied with being art-school, whilst their song-writing suffered, their sound was too one-dimensional and reliant on their hipper-than-thou image. This however, cannot be said for Mosquito, their most mature and unified album to date, for once the songs develop and grow with further listens; and it helps that Karen O adds a few different strings to her bow, even trading verses with fellow Brooklynite Kool Keith on Buried Alive. It finally feels as if the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have written a set of tracks that match the band’s personality.
BY CHRISTOPHER LEWIS
Best Track: Subway
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: In The Grace Of Your Love THE RAPTURE
In A Word: Heartfelt
