I'm not sure how it happened, but at some point, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs went from being a pretty damn cool punk band on their first EP, through the inevitable NME-driven mutation into bankable indie furniture, and now with their latest album they have decided to go 'electro'.
In this case, 'electro' seems to mean playing the same chords on studio synths that they would not normally play on their guitars, and perhaps explore some more exotic pedal setting. Not that this is necessarily a bad things. It's just that in the case of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it is.
Before the album came out, front-woman and charisma nugget Karen O said that the new album would not sound anything like 2006's Show Your Bones ("been there done that") and that it would sound very different from the Is Is EP that came out the following year. And right she was. Now I would never criticize a band for trying to explore new avenues of creativity and not sticking to a safe regurgitation of the same album every other year. However, this leads to album's such as It's Blitz, for which the expression ‘hit-and-miss' was seemingly invented.
The single ‘Zero' which opens the album is actually quite fun, and lays on a hearty buffet of synth strings lifted directly from Tubeway Army. I'm sure it will do well. It's just a shame that it is followed up by ‘Heads will Roll' which is a bit of a stinker. Slow it down a notch and it could pass for a Kylie b-side.
They do manage to atone for this however; through moments like ‘Dull Life' which draws on the old-school YYYs sound and has more energy and vigour in a single riff than some other tracks manage to muster collectively.
Yet their good work is undone yet again by the frankly shocking banality of 'Dragon Queen', which is pretty devoid of any of the great qualities we have come to expect from the band who burst into the collective XFM consciousness with ‘Bang' all those years ago.
To put into perspective how toothless and watered down some of these tracks sound, go back and listen to the band's debut EP. And while the new album is more textured and complex (in places) it would have been nice if they could also have mustered a bit more of the energy and danger that underpinned those songs.
I can understand that Karen O wants to live out a rock-star fantasy. Hell, who doesn't? And to do that, she needs to sell albums and write accessible songs. Otherwise they would long since have become a great-but-with-limited-appeal band in the mould of X-Ray Spex. Perhaps Karen just needs to find the right balance between Debbie Harry and Poly Styrene. Sadly, this album is just not it.
