Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- Show Your Bones

7/10

Upstate New York. Not as good.

The line above this was my placeholder for this review, but I might as well leave it here because it's apt.

"Gold Lion" kicks off Yeah Yeah Yeahs' second album, 2006's Show Your Bones, and serves as a statement of change in purpose and sound: Acoustic guitars. Keyboards. Zero aggression. That first album might have been abrasive, and invoked an early 00's, post 9/11 New York back-alley club. But this one...

Well, it sounds like that band playing in that back-alley club made it big and moved upstate. Get ready for a bunch more of that acoustic guitar and a whole lot more keyboard. There's still crunchy guitar, and Karen O still snarls every now and then, but she's mostly singing melodically here. The band are still playing a club, but now it's the Country Club of Rochester. 

I mean, it's fine. Show Your Bones is fine. It's a pleasant, lower risk, lower reward version of Yeah Yeah Yeahs first album. The edges are mostly smoothed away. I dig that they explore space more here, like on the trippy, spaced out "Fancy," or the endless riff that moseys through "Phenomena."

In a way, Show Your Bones is a cultural harbinger. The immediate years after 9/11 produced a lot of art seeped in darkness, with a grittier edge. Throughout the final years of the 00's, that began to give way to the godawful, Pitchfork-approved "quiet revolution," where bands like Grizzly Bear and the Dirty Projectors didn't rock out so hard. With that said, Yeah Yeah Yeahs are still a good band, and having your music sound like it could feature in a Wes Anderson or Sofia Coppola film from the mid-to-late 00's isn't a bad thing. I just wish this album felt less like a corporate product (which I don't think it even is--I think the band chilled things out a little because they wanted to make something different from their first album). I wish Show Your Bones sounded more like the output of a hungry band, instead of one that has Chad and Karen nodding their heads between toddies, golf-clapping, and whispering "this band rocks." 


2006 Interscope
1. Gold Lion 3:07
2. Way Out 2:51
3. Fancy 4:24
4. Phenomena 4:10
5. Honeybear 2:25
6. Cheated Hearts 3:58
7. Dudley 3:41
8. Mysteries 2:35
9. The Sweets 3:55
10. Warrior 3:40
11. Turn Into 4:05