Yeah Yeah Yeahs burst out of Brooklyn with more buzz than a swarm of wasps in the wake of the NYC explosion of rock ‘n roll spearheaded by the Strokes. A self-titled EP and a rip-roaring single set up their album Fever to Tell nicely, and it delivered somewhat, offering a scattergun of ideas and a heap of energy.

Through it all, “Maps” stood out like beacon – a fully-formed song with an actual beginning and end, and Karen O sang on it rather than shrieked, screamed, hollered of yowled. Now, for their second effort, Yeah Yeah Yeahs have essentially taken that formula and nailed it over a succession of eleven cuts. Show Your Bones is the sound of a band straightening out and buffing off some of the edge, but the songs are that much better that it doesn’t really matter.

It starts with single “Gold Lion” which, funnily enough, turns out to be one of the weakest songs – it sounds like Tegan and Sara, and uses the ol’ grunge crux of quiet-loud construction to get its point across. Far stronger is the awesome “Phenomena”, on which the trio base the title and swinging rhythm on LL Cool J’s “Phenomenon”, itself ‘borrowed’ from NYC natives Liquid Liquid’s “Cavern”. “The Sweets”, as you might expect given its title, sits alongside “Dudley” as another great pop moment, while the powerful “Fancy” and “Warrior” offer a nastier edge that most certainly has never truly been apparent before.

Where Fever to Tell was all bright lights and fun, Show Your Bones is in many ways a typical sophomore set not just in that it offers far darker, but also more rounded fare than its predecessor. “Cheated Hearts” goes through all the right progressions and builds to come to its full result. It’s typical of the album; not only has more care been given to the construction of the songs but also the sound of them, with extra instrumentation creeping in here and there.