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It’s massive, perhaps even bigger than that. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have not just thrown the kitchen sink at their comeback, they’ve hurled the whole damn house at it. Somewhere between manic and epic, this gargantuan record is a force to behold. With the sort of trembling energy that makes you scared to drop it too heavily onto the turntable in case it Chernobyls your coffee table set up, you simply can’t ignore it—it grabs you by the lapels and rattles you like the Shakin’ Stevens holding a polaroid picture.
The years that have passed have clearly had no sway on the straightforward mindset of the band. Their direction here is commit-like. They have not been pulled down the rabbit hole of a new direction or felt the flirting wink of an emerging genre. They’ve just gone absolutely mad with sequencers and a sound that pops your collar up like Eric Cantana’s tailor. It sounds like how you might imagine an indie bowl cut Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to sound: massive. The only thing it’s lacking is a few cannon blasts.
Granted, none of this screams refinement. Guilty, there isn’t a drop of it. It’s all or nothing on everything track. Even the prose on the near-pretentious finale, ‘Mars’, is perturbingly bristling. However, in an era where a lot of stuff sounds the same or else the thrill of unbridled euphoria is sequestered in favour of a challenging middle eight, it’s as refreshing as a cold shower to hear a record that simply swings from the hip and tries to smash the most melodious home runs that anyone has ever hit into the sonic stratosphere.
That’s all there is to it. And what more could you want? That’s not to say that the songwriting is vapid or there is no nuance or progressive intent worth analysis, but with what sounds like a thousand violins buzzing in your ear as Karen O’s atmospheric topline overtures conjure edge of the universe imagery, you’re hardly moved to do anything other than sit there in awe.
The songs follow a simple structure. Usually built on a piano refrain that builds up from a gathering chord progression, thanks to a pounding drum loop and the incoming flourishes of little syncopated riffs, the songs erupt in phased culminations like ‘Heads Will Roll’ hit the gym and was reproduced using alien technology. For this frenzied adrenaline hit, producer Dave Sitek deserves huge credit. Cool It Down makes a mockery of the notion that something can be over-produced, favouring to go with the term celestially produced instead.
With rampant force, the old indie stalwarts have declared themselves back on the scene in style. Albeit they are most certainly no longer part of the scene. Far from a dated outfit, re-emerging and trying to fit in—they seem to have flown the nest many years ago and this huge record has been spat back from the edge of the universe, with all the highfalutin madness such an image entails. You simply can’t listen to it without being dragged towards such starry thoughts by the astronauts of bohemia.
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