Yeah Yeah Yeahs return with the best album of their career.
It’s been a duller world without the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Despite their close association with the heralded New York rock scene at the turn of the century, Karen O, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase had very little in common with The Strokes et al in terms of attitude.
Where Casablancas and co. radiated traditional rock star cool (sunglasses, smoking etc), O and her bandmates found their natural home in exuberance and showpersonship.
Of course, with her trademark leather jackets and fingerless gloves O made her own version of cool, but the definition of what makes something ‘cool’ is for another time.
In the two decades since, Yeah Yeah Yeahs have kept that reputation and built on it. Despite a paucity of albums (Cool It Down is only their fifth and their first in nine years) they’ve largely delivered on that promising start, unlike many of their peers.
Even if the albums in that time haven’t been to everyone’s taste, they came with a cast-iron guarantee of at least one classic single – Gold Lion, Zero and Sacrilege (among others) will have to make room in their club for the latest entry: Burning.
Built upon the foundations of a Motown piano loop, impatient strings and snarling, intermittent chords from Zinner, it’s a wonderful piece of indie-gospel rock.
O intorts the lyrics about climate change (‘Into the sea, out of the fire, all that burning’) with breathy gusto and dramatic poise in the fashion that only she can. A contender for song of the year.
The rest of the album doesn’t quite hit the same heights, but with such a high bar that’s understandable. In the intervening nine years since Mosquito, Karen O has not only released two solo albums but also had a son, and the burdens of the younger generation informs much of the lyrical content across the album, as well as environmental collapse and the primal longing for closeness after our global separation.
On the epic Spitting Off The Edge Of The World (a title that befits the scale of the song), O intones that, ‘Silver lines whisper to me, wounded arms must carry the load’, while instructing ‘cowards’ to ‘bow your heads.’ Yet the title itself is a rallying call of defiance and hope.
The presence of Perfume Genius is largely unrequired; his vocals are so imperceptible that they’re barely there, leaving it largely and rightly as The O Show. Slow but majestic, it’s an attention-grabbing start.
Sadly, what follows is something of a misstep as the plodding Lovebomb fails to capitalise. There’s little wrong with the song: it’s meditative and spiritual, with a plea to ‘let the time come when hearts fall in love’ and synthesizers as the sound of sunrise, but placed as only the second song seems misjudged, its natural home on the latter stages of any album.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs have never been shy about their influences (the album title is lifted from The Velvet Underground’s Loaded), and they’ve never been more apparent: Wolf starts like Kate Bush, the opening line recalling Duran Duran, then bursts into life with MASSIVE synths, utilised operatically, Pet Shop Boys style.
Elsewhere, the juddering, pensive Blacktop lifts lines from Dylan Thomas while aping Julia Holter, while Fleez goes for the two-pronged approach: O sings about dancing to ESG while lifting a hook from one of their songs (Moody). Robotic with probing bass, it’s the sound of Kraftwerk in the club.
At only eight songs Cool It Down is a slight album, and even the last track is more of a poem as O reflects on the state of the world and ask her son, ‘What I looked like to him. Mars, he said, with a glint in his eye’. Mars follows the desolate disco of Different Today, which places global angst against uplifting, glittering electro-pop.
After such a lengthy hiatus it would be reasonable to assume Yeah Yeah Yeahs had lost some of their inspiration or guile. Not a bit of it.
Cool It Down is a distillation of all their strengths and, whisper it, possibly their strongest collection of songs. Until the greatest hits, at any rate.
