Music Review: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “It’s Blitz!” (Interscope)
Rating: 81
After the jagged guttersnipe dance-punk of “Fever to Tell,” Yeah Yeah Yeahs fell into a holding pattern with its sophomore disc, 2006’s “Show Your Bones,” but “It’s Blitz!” is one of the most bracing stylistic turnarounds in recent memory. The deployment of synthetic sounds could have scuttled all that make the Yeah Yeah Yeahs great, but Karen O, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase wrote beautifully icy songs that sound like love among the robots that still rock with unhinged conviction.
The pulse-and-sweep of “Zero” results in the band’s best single to date. Karen O’s lyrics are still mostly impressionistic bursts of neuroses — it’s anyone’s guess what she means by “get your leather on,” but her singed emotions make listeners want to follow orders. Ditto for the more overtly electro-dancing “Heads Will Roll,” in which she declares “You are chrome”: it might not make immediate sense, but it sounds like a good thing.
In the past, ballads were not always YYYs strong suit, “Maps” notwithstanding, but the Celtic-flavored “Skeletons” is an epic corrective, and the straight disco of “Dragon Queen” shows real facility with funk. Co-produced by David Sitek of TV on the Radio and legendary post-punk producer Nick Launay, “It’s Blitz!” achieves that careful balance of being eminently listenable while jumping free of comfort zones. The soon-to-be classic album art says it all — Yeah Yeah Yeahs fearlessly broke a few eggs.
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