Oh, Oh, Karen O, here she comes - Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, Eeow! - and she's rich boy, she'll take you out, boy. Karen O, frontgirl of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, wants to be on top, and not just the music charts, she wants to be on top of you, boy. And so if you've listened to the band's debut full-length album "Fever to Tell" (Interscope) then you already know that Karen O can do whatever, whoever, wherever.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are the latest of New York's post-modern punk bands to emerge from obscurity, and the ruins of 911, to create art that gives a shag. After the Strokes performed on Saturday Night Live, with guitarist Albert Hammond, Jr. sporting a Yeah Yeah Yeah's badge, everyone began courting Karen O and the other two Yeahs. They got their record deal, and "Fever to Tell" is the end product they created for your consumption. Is it worth eating? Yeah.
Th record, of course, is a lot about shagging, or at least the sounds of shagging. From the "Material Girl"-like yelps in "Black Tongue" where Karen O subverts language and meaning: "Boy, you're just a stupid bitch / and Girl, you're just a no good dick," to her invocation of Jim Morrison, the Lizard King, in "Cold Light", where she eggs the humper on, singing "Ride, Daddy, Ride / Ride out the tide". Is Karen O the Lizard Queen? Yeah.
The Yeah Yeah Yeah's, born in the fall of 2000, are a trinity - Karen O on vocals, Brian Chase on drums, and Nick Zinner on guitar - and like Nirvana, they know a thing or two about mixing melody and angst. The band is lucky to have an adroit guitarist like Zinner and a no-bullshit drummer like Chase, the ugly beauty of their songs rests on their ability to put the art back into punk, and the punk back into art. The band is at its best when Karen O's voice sounds like it got shot through a wormhole to a distant part of the universe.
The steady mechanical L-train guitar riffs and drumbeat in "No No No" jettisons the listener into the last three tracks on the disc: "Maps", "Y Control", and "Modern Romance". Quieter, more introspective, these individual songs are beautiful stirring ballads that create an atmosphere that is more fragile and complicated, inviting the listener to return to the cocksure anarchy at the beginning. There are enough weird Dr. Who sounds here to remind us that this is music made in the twenty-first century, and not the 1970s. Let future music historians beware of our nostalgia. Yeah.
