Post punk apparently still has beautiful days ahead of it, as the first feverish album by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs can attest, firing out their rough cuts with an unfeigned frenzy.
From the first notes on "Rich" Karen O's voice captures the listener, raucous and serious, before becoming inflamed in a vindictive refrain. Like "Date With The Night", the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' songs resemble happy mess, irremediably contagious, where various themes—love, sex, social—are kneaded and passed through the thundering rhythm, voice and guitar compressor. Their process is without concession and authentic, in the vein of the Stooges and MC5, antipodal to the other groups of the moment stamped "punk" who pose on all the magazines.
Multiplying breaks like attacks of epilepsy, their music surprises especially as the pieces are limited to the bare minimum in terms of length and production, which brings them closer to post-Pixies Franck Black.
Then, just at the moment when you think you're familiarized with their music, the sublimes "Map", "Y Control" and "Modern Romance" arrive, suddenly taking you back to the first hours of Siouxsie & the Banshees halfway between punk and new wave.
Fever To Tell closes on an uncredited acoustic ballad which proves that Yeah Yeah Yeahs are as much at ease in a fit of rage as in more intimate moments.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs Fever To Tell
