It's Blitz!
It’s Blitz! is the album that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were always meant to make, without necessarily being the album that anyone ever expected to hear from them. On the one hand, it’s a major pop move—every song is like an iron-clad chart-monster, calibrated for maximum dramatic impact. The up-tempo numbers surge toward rallying choruses; the ballads ache in all the right places. Karen O strips her lyrics down to oblique poetics—a litany of repeatable metaphors and similes designed for you to project onto (On “Skeletons,” does she sing “love don’t cry” or “love, don’t cry”?)—while Chase and Nick Zinner frame her performances with compelling and simple arrangements. The band spent its entire last album tweaking the formula they established with “Maps,” to diminishing returns. On It’s Blitz!, they turn out a couple of songs that could compete with their establishing hit: “Skeletons,” on which Brian Chase’s drums march like they’re soundtracking Empire of the Sun; and “Hysteric,” one of the best songs of the year in any genre.
On the other hand, It’s Blitz! also trades out the assaultive guitars that helped define the first part of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ career for keyboards and synthetic sounds. This isn’t an entirely unprecedented move—Rilo Kiley made a similar shift with 2007’s Under the Blacklight, which transformed the alt-country-leaning indie rockers into a streamlined 80’s groove band. But, where Rilo Kiley’s effort didn’t have a whole lot of actual muscle behind its stylistic flourishes, It’s Blitz! is like a master yoga instructor—lean, but strong as fuck. The thorny guitar parts of old high points like Fever to Tell’s “Pin” and “Bang” from their debut EP translate into analogous brittle synthesizer riffs, and Zinner composes with such precision that most of the time you don’t even realize he’s there.
“Maps” either awakened or betrayed a secret desire within the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—a desire for arena rock—and It’s Blitz! makes good on that desire. In an age when music is only getting more and more insular, Yeah Yeah Yeahs are clearly swinging for a mass audience, regardless of whether or not that’s actually even achievable, given the state of the music industry. Thing is, the band has the tools and the musicianship to back up its ambition. It’s Blitz! may contain ten of the biggest songs of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ career, but it also contains ten of their most tightly wound.
-Martin Brown, 2009
So - seriously, am I the only one who thinks this album was a major drop-off from Show Your Bones? Am I the only one who thinks that Show Your Bones was one of the best albums of the decade? Because I am constantly seeing it derided - is the grand critical reappraisal just not going to happen? Sigh.
Posted by: Tim O'Neil | 2009.12.31 at 14:43