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Live review: Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Karen O is a strange and complicated frontwoman. This is, of course, a large part of her band’s genius. Their headlining set was just an hour, but it was easily one of Friday’s most riveting hours. The trio-plus-hired-multi-instrumentalist Dav Pajo (Slint) played a hi-octane set part chunky noise rock, part club-ready dance fevers that made a case for them as one of their generation’s truly excellent live bands. (Giant eyeball beach balls, much like the giant eye that has become their on-stage prop this year, bounced around the crowd. This is the only way beach balls should ever appear at a festival. The end.)
At once mannered and raw, distanced and immediate, O owns whatever stage she’s on almost by default, whether it involves opening the show in a kimono covered in stylized eyes, looking every inch the fashion Jedi while singing the spare, melodramatic “Runaway” or bouncing around the stage to their brilliant single “Zero,” one of the year’s most infectious slices of neo-New Wave dance rock. She makes the most of small motions (cradling the mic, gesturing with her hands) or cheap-seats moves (spitting water into the air, stuffing the mic in her mouth). Her vulnerability during “Maps” should still make everyone with a heart a little verklempt, even if it is more acting that open-vein heartache.You want to roll your eyes one minute, dance wildly the next and give her a hug by the next song.
But she also seems to feel the need to roar out the end of every sentence - it’s her shtickiest move and serves to add another, obfuscatory layer to her performance.
Guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase are perfect foils, Chase with metronome drumming and Zinner with spare riffs that sketch out the song without over-playing it. He’s the Edge of New York noise rock - his music is filled with simple riffs, be they on guitar or jeys, that giver his singer’s outsitzed persona something to hang on.
The set leaned heavily on this year’s “It’s Bliz!” (“Dull Life,” the crowd-moving “Heads Will Roll,” the moving “Skeletons”) and a few older, poppier songs (“Gold Lion”). She headed into the crowd for some sing along choruses during “Cheated Hearts.”
Maybe her days of public emotional exhaustion are gone. But we still have the music. And she’s still an amazing entertainer.
Jay Janner photo
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