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Rats Will Cry


 Show Your Bones
 Yeah Yeah Yeahs
 Interscope, 2006
 Numerical Feelings: 7.8

Here the band calms down and gets reflective, and sure you can claim the results are predictable, but only if you predicted the results would be very good -- otherwise, hey, why do you have to be such an asshole?

And, sure, the rabid, muscular, larger-than-life super-hooks of 'No No No' and 'Maps' are missed (though the more-coked-up-than-life craziness of some of those other songs is really not), but Show Your Bones comes close to making up for the missing sporadic genius of its predecessor with solid, consistent smartness. The hooks are abundant, though tamed; the pensive, repetitive song structures, though they seem to make things dreary at first, imbue repeated themes with new power and meaning via nuanced, subtle movements.

Show Your Bones is engaging enough when you are actually listening to it. The band haven't really become sufficiently clever at the nuts and bolts of their new post-punk sound, to make it completely gripping by virtue of craft alone -- but they're close, and if you let it, the flowing logic of these songs will prove amply rewarding. Particularly in the last three tracks, with the desolate, folk-inflected balladry of 'Sweets' and 'Warrior' featuring more contrast in tone than the previous numbers -- and with the utterly fantastic closer 'Turn Into', in which cold logic mounts a torrential rush of inspiration, washing up, leaving its high water-mark far up on the shore of some truly bitchin' future.

-5.11.2006
Show Your Bones is the Yeah Yeah Yeah's sophomore effort. Have they dispensed with the black ooze and grease and oozy greasy corpse-humping that once defined their sound?

Track Listing:
01 Gold Lion
02 Way Out
03 Fancy
04 Phenomena
05 Honeybear
06 Cheated Hearts*
07 Dudley
08 Mysteries
09 The Sweets*
10 Warrior
11 Turn Into*
(*: mega-awesomist tracks)