I like to think we’d follow Karen O and her male compatriots
anywhere, wouldn’t you? I know I sure as hell would. The YEAH YEAH
YEAHS’ hard and fast burst onto the scene in the early 2000s surely
left everyone panting along for more of their ferocious tunes. In the
almost nine years since their formation, the leotards got brighter, the
howls found some harmony, the drums were angrier and the guitars kept
you hanging on for dear life. That is until earlier in the year, when
the group’s latest offering, It’s Blitz!, came along and changed all of
that, leaving a look of shock on our faces, but for a totally different
reason.
“I really hate it when people say we made a ‘dance
album’ like it’s this betrayal, or a bad thing,” says Nick Zinner,
guitarist-cum-synth-player of the trio. With a slightly defensive tone
he adds “all our albums are dance albums; it’s just a different type of
dancing. We got together when dancing was illegal in New York, to
command people to move.” And command they did. With the play-on-words
name coming straight from the New York vernacular, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
overhauled the stiff grunge gig-goers and turned them into a sweaty,
thrashing mess.
It’s Blitz! found the band in their early thirties
and in need of a change of territory. The now famous foray saw an
abandonment of Zinner’s guitars and found replacements with a synth and
some acoustic guitars instead. The change of direction saw a jump on
the disco resurrection bandwagon, but in true Yeah Yeah Yeahs style;
the record still holds their delectable originality that people flock
toward and cram their iPods with.
When asked about the shift Zinner concedes “I
wouldn’t say it was something I enjoyed, but it was essential. It was
something that needed to happen for us to be happy with what we made.
We can’t keep making the same albums,” Zinner admits frankly. “We’re
not the type of people that are happy staying totally safe and
producing the same albums. As musicians we always want to go somewhere
else.
“Before we recorded I hadn’t even had that much to
do with synths; some remixing stuff, but I bought it off eBay maybe two
weeks before we went in and just decided to bring it along. In
hindsight I’m glad I did.”
With Brian Chase banging on skins for hours, Zinner
twisting and tinkering away, and O taking it away to play with and
write melodies, the album was a fractioned process creating a more
layered effect than previous albums. “We just holed up in a barn and
laid the first part down. All you could see was snow, everywhere,” he
recalls. “For the final takes we went just outside El Paso and did the
rest in the desert. Getting the album to a point where we released it
was long, but I’m really proud of what we made and it’s finally at a
point where I enjoy playing those songs live.”
Making a trip to Australia for the Falls Festival
and a slew of other dates around the nation, it will be the first time
the trio have been together in several months ...
READ MORE [slide down] »
I like to think we’d follow Karen O and her male compatriots
anywhere, wouldn’t you? I know I sure as hell would. The YEAH YEAH
YEAHS’ hard and fast burst onto the scene in the early 2000s surely
left everyone panting along for more of their ferocious tunes. In the
almost nine years since their formation, the leotards got brighter, the
howls found some harmony, the drums were angrier and the guitars kept
you hanging on for dear life. That is until earlier in the year, when
the group’s latest offering, It’s Blitz!, came along and changed all of
that, leaving a look of shock on our faces, but for a totally different
reason.
“I really hate it when people say we made a ‘dance
album’ like it’s this betrayal, or a bad thing,” says Nick Zinner,
guitarist-cum-synth-player of the trio. With a slightly defensive tone
he adds “all our albums are dance albums; it’s just a different type of
dancing. We got together when dancing was illegal in New York, to
command people to move.” And command they did. With the play-on-words
name coming straight from the New York vernacular, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
overhauled the stiff grunge gig-goers and turned them into a sweaty,
thrashing mess.
It’s Blitz! found the band in their early thirties
and in need of a change of territory. The now famous foray saw an
abandonment of Zinner’s guitars and found replacements with a synth and
some acoustic guitars instead. The change of direction saw a jump on
the disco resurrection bandwagon, but in true Yeah Yeah Yeahs style;
the record still holds their delectable originality that people flock
toward and cram their iPods with.
When asked about the shift Zinner concedes “I
wouldn’t say it was something I enjoyed, but it was essential. It was
something that needed to happen for us to be happy with what we made.
We can’t keep making the same albums,” Zinner admits frankly. “We’re
not the type of people that are happy staying totally safe and
producing the same albums. As musicians we always want to go somewhere
else.
“Before we recorded I hadn’t even had that much to
do with synths; some remixing stuff, but I bought it off eBay maybe two
weeks before we went in and just decided to bring it along. In
hindsight I’m glad I did.”
With Brian Chase banging on skins for hours, Zinner
twisting and tinkering away, and O taking it away to play with and
write melodies, the album was a fractioned process creating a more
layered effect than previous albums. “We just holed up in a barn and
laid the first part down. All you could see was snow, everywhere,” he
recalls. “For the final takes we went just outside El Paso and did the
rest in the desert. Getting the album to a point where we released it
was long, but I’m really proud of what we made and it’s finally at a
point where I enjoy playing those songs live.”
Making a trip to Australia for the Falls Festival
and a slew of other dates around the nation, it will be the first time
the trio have been together in several months. “Taking time out is
something that’s really important for us, especially Karen. So she’s
not always writing songs about being sad and lonely out on the road,”
he laughs.
While Chase has been busy earning himself a spot as
one of the top 50 drummers in the world and Zinner pursues his other
project, mathcore band HeadWoundCity, O has been busy working with The
Kids on the Where The Wild Things Are soundtrack. A busy year indeed.
“It’s really nice to just go our own ways and then
come back together as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It’s not solely what
identifies us. I can’t imagine what the pressures of being a lead
singer are, I’m just a guitarist in a band.”
When asked the typical question of what the future
holds for the band, Zinner answers simply “who knows? No one can
predict those things, but in terms of making another album and where
we’ll go with it, we’ll always want to do new things and take our sound
somewhere else.
“If we continued to make the same records we
wouldn’t even be coming to Australia or travelling the world. And I
think we would have quit doing it a long time ago too. I feel
incredibly lucky to be doing what I’m doing, though there’s different
things that come along with being in a band for so long. It makes life
interesting when people start recognising you and you’re getting shit
yelled at you in the street; good and bad. It definitely makes things
interesting.”
When asked if he thinks It’s Blitz! was the cause
of all the slamming Zinner remarks “well, most of what they say is
good, so I don’t think we pissed off too many people with the last
album after all. But those are all things I stopped thinking about a
long time ago.”
Yeah Yeah Yeahs are playing at the sold out Falls
Festival over New Year’s and are also playing their own show at the
Hordern Pavilion in Sydney on Friday January 8. Tickets are available
through Ticketek.
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