5/22: No noise...
1
This may sound weird, given their Spin cover-gracing ubiquity amongst New Yorkophiliac hipsters, but the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have always held an underdog's charm for me. At their best, the band's songs - at least from their first EP through 2003's Fever To Tell - have sounded like happy accidents, the result of guitarist Nick Zinner looping and accenting a riff ad infinitum and letting singer Karen O yelp over it until it took form. At their worst, of course, they've sounded like throwaway Chainsaw Records 7" tracks from the late nineties, but that's part of the draw: During their five-ish year existence, the trio has always had a unique (and hapless) ability to teeter between substance and sheen, somehow anchoring their Williamsburg buzz-and-dazzle with universal sentiment. They've been a theoretically crappy band that's overcome their own mediocre premise (i.e. "fashionista girl croons while a well-coiffed guitarist and anonymous drummer pound out post-punky garage stuff") and, for the most part, hit their own singular rock n' roll sweet spots (see: "Maps," "Y-Control" from 2003's Fever to Tell).
The problem with this kind of band, though, is that it runs on essentially two fuels: Youth and, to a degree, Amateurishness. And that's why Show Your Bones, the band's newest record, is a big sophomore buzzkill on par with, say, Ben Lee's adult-contempo fall from grace Breathing Tornadoes - i.e. a half-assed attempt at pseudo-maturity from an artist that doesn't understand its own appeal. The band has, for some reason, completely abandoned the melodic, song-oriented noise of their earlier work for "subtle" fare like stolen Love & Rockets riffs ("Gold Lion"), cheap sentimental reference points (the lifted nursery rhymery of "Dudley") and, of course, squeaky clean production (courtesy, I shit you not, of some guy named Squeak E. Clean). The resulting 2006-style mess - vocals ProTooled into gaudy oblivion, airless instrumentation, etc. - plays like a listless veer into post-"Maps" Modern Rock blandness that can't think of anywhere else to go. On some level, Show Your Bones recalls the Ramones' turn-of-the-decade jump from tightly packed pop songs like "Rock N' Roll Radio" to winsome (if political) cheese like "Bonzo Goes To Bitburg" in the late 70s/early 80s: The ever-noble Need To Change is all over this record, but, ultimately, the band's need to move forward crushes what little personality it ever had. The record reads like a rough sketch of an already ill-advised sonic map - an identity crisis from a band that lived and died on Karen O's identity. And, yeah, it's baffling.
2
In other news, I've been reading Mary Karr's first autobio, The Liars' Club, and, though it's making me reconsider my memoir moratorium - I'd pretty much abandoned the genre after reading Dave Eggers's infuriatingly lopsided A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius - plowing through the book's has still been exhausting. Much like Eggers's book (and, given the shitty circumstances and tragedy-starved marketplace that often begat them, a lot of milennial memoirs), Karr views her truckload of Awful Life Occurances through a lens of pitch-black humor and weird geniality, but there's a per-chapter rate of horror here that trumps Genius's numbing, self-reflexive exhaustion about ten times over. What Karr's offering is, for the most part, harrowing, and though she tends to tell her tale of mental illnesses/divorce/rape/familial negligence/etc. with the good-natured aplomb of someone caught midway through a really great anecdote, there's a certain sting to the book that keeps me from going with the whole "Boy, I've got a story" shtick it's selling. In fact, reading The Liars' Club really just feels like the literary equivalent of being a bystander at a friend's friend's intervention: Sure, there's a catharsis being achieved, but that doesn't make it any less awkward to witness. What saves the book from being another painful (and solipsistic) run through the memoir mill is Karr's hyperregional voice, a confident blend of roughshod East Texas jargon and dead-on lyrical description that keeps heavy moments from being too horrifying and the light from starry-eyed wonder. Most of Karr's work previous to Club consisted of poetry and, happily, the book moves with the sharp sense of rhythm and glossable detail of a poet trying - and pulling off - prose. Given that the book's going for $.01 on Amazon.com (note: I claim allegiance with Powells.com, for the most part, but I'm just sayin'), I'd slap down the shipping costs and pick it up, particularly if you're a memoir buff. Of course, if you are, you've likely already read it.
3
Updates should be coming fast and furious soon-ish... I recently received (and accepted) an offer to study fiction writing as a grad student at Johns Hopkins University, so I'll have more free time to write (if less time to do anything else) within the next couple months. Until then, check back once in a while. I might be around...