Visto e Considerato che in Italia, quasi nessuno dice nulla:

The cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ debut LP, 2003’s Fever to Tell, set an early-decade benchmark for sheer ugliness, a deliberately heinous splatter of webbed blood, stabbed snakes, and flaming heads. The music was also confrontational, with lead singer Karen O following in the footsteps of countless riot grrls and righteous rock queens in crafting a persona of raw defiance and sexual menace.

Fast-forward six years, and a glance at the instantly iconic cover of the band’s third full-length, It’s Blitz!, tells you all you need to know about how far the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have come, from Fever to Tell through the middle-ground growing pains of 2006’s Show Your Bones and up to today. A clean, simple image of a woman’s hand bursting an egg– it’s no less powerful an indication of feminine strength and defiance than Fever‘s abrasive scrawl, yet it’s miles and miles more subversive. It’s also a fitting symbol for its music, taking familiar shapes and tools and recombining them in ways that are bracing and unexpected.

It’s Blitz! is constructed from parts that by themselves aren’t extraordinary– in fact, many of them are quite banal, like the generic Franz-Bloc-Killers modern rock riff that propels “Dull Life” or the doomy one that drives “Shame and Fortune”, sounding ripped straight off a late-period Smashing Pumpkins record. Much has been made of the album’s heavy reliance on rock’s eternal bugaboo, the synth, but often the synths are doing rock things rather than dance things, like on the buzzing, road-burning opener “Zero”. Only two songs, “Heads Will Roll” and “Dragon Queen”, deliver real disco backbeats.

With these unremarkable tools, however, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs still create great, compelling pop-rock, largely because of the way the songs themselves are organized, with conventional verse-chorus structures repeatedly eschewed in favor of detours, miniature grooves, and lengthy asides that produce the sensation of a band and a singer impulsively following their own emotional whims. Take the lovely, insinuating “Soft Shock”, for instance– it starts with tinkly keyboards and an Far East-sounding melody that builds to a refrain utilizing the words in the song’s title, but it isn’t the song’s emotional climax, which is hidden until later, when Karen worriedly intones “what’s the time, what’s the day, gonna leave me?” Even more compositionally jarring are the slow, stretched-out set showcases “Skeletons” and “Runaway”, the former taking a blippy little electro-ballad and then plopping martial drums and a melody that sounds taken from some Scottish battle hymn smack dab in the middle. In keeping with the arty tendencies that have blossomed within the band from the beginning, these songs often feel portioned out into passages or movements as opposed to flowing organically throughout.

With such an absence of easy signposts, we’re especially apt to follow Karen wherever she goes, since she’s our only hope for a guide. Yet she refuses to be a locus of explanation or control, keeping her lyrics generally vague and frequently losing herself in bursts of incomprehensible excitement or fervor. These fits and embellishments account for most of the best moments on the album– the way she breathlessly pants “crying, crying, crying” on “Zero”, or giddily draws out the last syllable of the line “a hundred years old” on “Dull Life”, or how “Heads Will Roll” and “Dragon Queen” periodically dissipate into an inchoate softness.

The ninth song on Fever to Tell was “Maps”, a fleeting glimpse of vulnerability on an album of gleeful scorn. On It’s Blitz! that slot is occupied by “Hysteric”, a song every bit as emotionally naked and immediately indelible as “Maps”. Here though, it represents an island of piercing clarity and happy convention in a sea of bewilderment, impulse, and ecstasy.     8.1