The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are a band that's designed not to be ignored. You can't ignore a band whose singer, Karen O, alternately channels Joan Jett, Betty Boop, Frau Farbissina and Jenna Jameson. You can't ignore a band who has a song with the chorus "Boy, you're just a stupid bitch, and girl, you're just a no-good dick." You just can't.
The music press, not surprisingly, has given the Yeah Yeah Yeahs plenty of attention ever since their self-titled debut EP was released in late 2001. Now that the band has completed touring stints with The Strokes and the White Stripes and their first full-length album, "Fever to Tell," has hit the shelves, the three Brooklynites have found themselves in the pages of Rolling Stone for the first time.
Four-star reviews of "Fever to Tell" have been pouring in. Rock critics worship the dirt on the soles of Karen O's high heels. And still the question remains: are the accolades justified? Are the Yeah Yeah Yeahs worthy of their next-big-thing status? After all, just because a band is unignorable doesn't mean they're any good -- just look at Marilyn Manson circa 1996.
In search of answers, we dive into "Fever to Tell." A cold, electro-tinged guitar lick opens the album. Soon Karen O is growling what sounds like "I'm rich/Like a hot noise." Make no mistake, you're listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Soon we get to "Date With the Night," the album's first single. "I'll set you off," Karen O gasps over and over again, nearing an inevitable climax. By the time the guitar cuts out after two and a half minutes, she must've found the right spot, because she lets out the most orgasmic "Oh!" this side of "Debbie Does Dallas."
Sex has been a big part of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' music since the beginning, of course, ever since their debut EP opened with a song called "Bang." Unlike most bands that ply eroticism, though, it never sounds like it's just an act. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Karen O has had orgasms onstage.
For sheer kinkiness, it's hard to beat "Black Tongue," a track that finds O alternately moaning Teutonic "uh-huhs" and letting out girlish "ooh!"s. Featuring repeating the infamous "stupid bitch" chorus, the song is catchy as hell, and the band is in better form than ever before. Just don't think too hard about lines like, "We're gonna keep it in the family."
The real surprise -- at least to those familiar with the Yeahs' oeuvre -- comes with new songs like "Maps," a slower-paced song on which Karen O actually sings the line "Wait, they don't love you like I love you." Beneath such astonishingly sentimental vocals, we still find Brian Chase's iron-fisted beats and Nicolas Zinner's gorgeous, fuzzed-out guitars.
The trouble is, for every "Maps," there's a song like "No No No," which one hopes the band included only so a Yeah Yeah Yeahs album could feature a song called "No No No." The track veers back and forth between boring, standard-issue indie-rock verses and overblown guitar solos.
There are plenty of gems to mine for in "Fever to Tell" -- the jazzy progressions of "Cold Light," outrageous lines like "We can do it to each other/We're like a sister and a brother," the sad, come-down nihilism of the closer "Modern Romance" -- but it takes an awful lot of work.
The bottom line is that listening to a so-called garage-rock record shouldn't be this difficult. The easy pleasures are too few, and there are too many songs that end up yielding little even after repeated listens. Karen O retains her status as the horniest-sounding rock star in the world, but ultimately it's a moot point.
"Fever to Tell" is a finer album than most bands in America will ever make. But it's not the best album the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are capable of making.
Like their first EP, the album has all the elements of earth-shattering rock and roll. And sometimes those elements come together in ways so ugly, brash or beautiful that they can't be ignored. When they fall short of those kinds of extremes, though, the result is just plain average -- and surely we deserve better.
