Yeah Yeah Yeahs - 'Tell Me What Rockers To Swallow' (Polydor)
5/5
By: Toby L
Encouraging, that a band such as Yeah Yeah Yeahs can for this long sustain the initial impact met by their inaugural entrance. Many peers have, after all, since fallen slain; twelve months is a long time in this game.
Need proof of triumph? 'Tell Me What Rockers To Swallow' - a DVD documenting an infamous, sold-out San Fran Fillmore auditorium gawping at Karen*O and associates in what can only be defined as a pant-fillingly sexy display. They've made it. They'll be remembered.
How? The Yeah Yeah Yeahs - uniquely - meld scrappy slutdom with arty mess panache, and create a spectacle in the process. Live, it's a compelling, intense display, and songs rumble and reverberate with the stinging sense that they could explode at any instance - a song such as 'Maps': surely, the finest love song of the 21st Century? A number so bracing, breathless and rampant that we experience hot flushes just during the pounding drum and weeping guitar intro. Who cares the drummer looks like a mathematician. This is punk - their way.
So, we're just a little impressed during their mammoth concert-appearance, then. Karen*O sprays chocolate on herself; drinks faux-suavely, decadently even, from a wine-glass; eats grapes during a mammoth 'Miles Away'; and pouts and snorts and winces and skips and hops and dances and sings like an angel-devil crossbreed; while guitarist Nick Zinner fops and flops his mane about while making beautiful guitar noises akin to a herd of starved monkeys trapped inside one of Spinal Tap's amps; and drummer Brian Chase holds this force together like, well, a mathematician.
The pace and power is exhausting - 'Date With The Night' is terrifying, in fact. And if you thought it could end, you were wrong - the pesky release includes bonus concert-footage, a whole bloody barrage of videos (inclusive of the Spike Jonze-spun 'Y Control') and cartoon imagery of the band-members resembling mutants.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs: sex itself in (com)motion. If you're not scared off, you'll be left enthralled.
Artists in this article: Yeah Yeah Yeahs
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