377. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Fever to Tell"

 


God, I forgot how hard this album goes.  This album absolutely fucks.  This album is a pure jagged slice of early-00's NYC dance punk, and it makes you feel young again, or even young for the first time.  I don't know how these songs were written but if you told me they locked themselves in a squat with no heat in Brooklyn for three days with nothing but red wine and Adderall and this is what came out of that I would believe you.  I was listening to it in my own house and I wanted to jump around and throw something through the window.  Fuck, this is a great record.

You are immediately drawn to Karen O's voice, a seething, screaming, prowling instrument that, at first anyway, dominates the sound, but then you realize that Nick Zinner's guitar is just as important, buzzing through the whole thing, playing off the vocals (or vice versa, I don't know).  Karen O and drummer Brian Chase met at Oberlin, which makes sense because these songs are all arty and avant-punky as hell.

No discussion of this album is complete without talking about the elephant in the room, "Maps," and once again we have the most-popular-song-on-the-album-isn't-like-the-rest-of-the-album syndrome.  "Maps" is undoubtedly a great song; a sparse, metronomic song with a slow, powerful buildup and instantly catchy melody hook, but it's fairly different from the rest of the songs on the album and I just think it's interesting that this keeps happening!

(Also, I don't know if anyone's noticed this before, but the chorus of Bloc Party's "Banquet" sounds suspiciously like "Rich," the first song on this album, which came out first.  Now, I don't want to throw around any allegations of wrongdoing, but what's going on here Bloc Party.)

Damn I wish it was Friday because this is a fucking Friday Album.  Put it on and pretend you have aggressive bangs and are doing shitty coke in a Williamsburg bar bathroom in 2004.

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