Show Your Bones

The new Yeah Yeah Yeahs disc

Karen O is weirdly awesome to the extreme. Nick Zinner is an indie guitarist to the max. As for drummer, Brian Chase, well… he is just cool, in his own way. To lay it down smoothly, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs rock. They rock hard. All three of the members are very independent in all of their own ways. Karen O lent her vocals for the awesome Nike shoe commercial song with Squeak E. Clean called “Hello”. Zinner has been a guitarist with Bright Eyes for a while, helping Conor Oberst with guitars in the studio and also touring with him at times, besides Zinner's other side projects, such as a completely different band he heads and a photo album he published.

Fever to Tell, Yeah Yeah Yeahs 2003 debut, was a great record. It's got to suck when these great indie-garage-rock-post-punk-revival-whatever-the-freakin’-hell-you-wanna-call-‘em bands release debuts so good that none of their new records can top (i.e. The Strokes genius 2001’s 'Is This It?' album in comparison to their suck-ass 2006’s 'First Impressions Of Earth'). Getting back to the point, the new YYYs isn’t bad. Quite the contrary, it did what 'Room on Fire' (2003 Strokes) did for me. It gave me 5 out of 12 songs to dance too. I’m still trying to find Show Your Bone’s “Under Control” (the best song off of ‘Room on Fire’) but some early contenders are Honeybear, Way Out, Warrior and even their single that hasn’t gotten old to me yet, Gold Lion. Too bad songs like Fancy and Mysteries get too weird with the Zinner warp guitar, Chase back-to-basics snare drum and cymbal crashes and Karen O’s sometime amusing, sometime utterly annoying trademark yelps, oohs, ahhs, shrieks, and whatever weird noise she feels like making.

Over all I would give Show Your Bones about a 3&1/2 to 4 on a 5 scale. I think Karen O is cool in her own deranged way but sometimes even I think some people throw themselves out there too much. Some of the howls have to stop. Along with those weird haircuts of hers. I thoroughly enjoyed this album. On a side note I really like the video for Gold Lion. A lot better than the ‘Maps’ video. As another reviewer said, Fever To Tell was the falling in love album, and Show Your Bones is the break up. Sometimes it helps to have a large (still with room for improvement) viewpoint on love. Listen to Honeybear or Phenomena.