I'm sure there's going to be a wide range of opinions, but I found the YYYs to be an interesting and energizing live show. I saw them at Black Cat, but missed their last show at the 9:30 Club....
January 13, 2004
ROCK REVIEW | YEAH YEAH YEAHS
Oblivious to the Ballroom, as if She Were Home Alone
By KELEFA SANNEH
When MTV started broadcasting its celebrity lifestyle program "Cribs," the idea seemed simple enough: famous people would invite camera crews into their homes, enhancing their glamorous reputations by showing off their mausoleum-size closets and 22-car garages.
But what is often shown instead is something less enviable and more interesting: pop stars who haven't had a chance to decorate because they're always on the road; bachelor athletes who can make a mansion look like a dorm room; just-got-paid rappers who put chintz in the dining room and a swimming pool in the living room. "Cribs" is full of wealthy stars who don't yet seem at home in their new homes; they've suddenly got huge new houses, and now they have to figure out how to fill them.
A similar thing happened to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the post-punk band that found itself headlining the cavernous Hammerstein Ballroom on Friday night. Since the success of "Fever to Tell" (Interscope), which was one of 2003's best CD's, the three band members have had to figure out how to fill bigger houses.
It was a triumphant performance, led by the singer Karen O, who teased the audience by feigning oblivion: onstage she acts as if she's alone in her bedroom, wriggling and flailing and squawking.
All night Karen O did what any new homeowner should do: she redecorated, performing an amusing pas de deux with the nimble stagehand whose job was to stave off chaos. He sprinted after her as she wrestled with speakers, festooned the amplifiers in strands of lights and tossed microphones this way and that.
While the drummer Brian Chase bashed out rudimentary rhythms, the guitarist Nick Zinner found restrained ways to add noise and melody. Unlike Jack White of the White Stripes, Mr. Zinner avoids wild, swooping blues riffs; he can generate just as much excitement by scrubbing a single chord for a few bars.
The last song, "Modern Romance," began with Karen O flat on her back, holding the microphone above her face, while Mr. Zinner peeled off slow-changing chords. Soon she picked herself up and whispered the chorus: "There is no modern romance." Then she walked toward the back of the stage and disappeared, leaving her band mates and the audience alone in her bedroom.
The opening acts found different ways to make themselves at home. The free-rock quartet Black Dice played up the incongruity by performing a great miniaturist set full of glowing guitar notes and growling, clicking electronics. At the end they were rewarded with scattered applause and a sound you don't often hear at an indie-rock concert: booing.
A dour, theatrical set by the art-rock band Liars never really got going, but the lightheaded folkie Devendra Banhart was more beguiling, strumming his guitar and murmuring his odd, anthropomorphic lyrics: "Hey there, mister sexy pig, you've mated with a man/And now you've got a little kid with hooves instead of hands." Perched cross-legged on a black cube in the middle of the stage, Mr. Banhart seemed to enjoy having Hammerstein Ballroom to himself for a few minutes. You might say he was house-sitting.
