Copyright © 2003
Scripps Howard News Service
This story was published Monday, November 10th, 2003
By DANNY HOOLEY, Raleigh News & Observer
(SH) - The past few years have been intense for acclaimed New York rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The trio of vocalist Karen O, guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase played their debut five-song set in 2001, opening for The (pre-big-deal) White Stripes in New York's East Village.
A few ecstatically reviewed independent releases made them college radio stars, culminating in this year's brilliant "Fever To Tell" album (Interscope).
Chase said the required road grind was hard to adjust to last year.
"It was a very difficult time for us," Chase said. "That was part of a monthlong U.S. tour, and we just canceled the whole first half of it - mostly because things were kind of getting too hectic for us. We weren't really sure what we going to happen at that point, whether we were still going to be a band, or anything."
Chase said that the remedy was time off and that now things are "grand."
Chase met his future singer in the late '90s, when he was a jazz studies major at Oberlin College in Ohio, a school famous among indie rock fans as Liz Phair's alma mater.
Chase graduated in 2000. Karen O was a film student there briefly before transferring to New York University.
The two didn't play together at that time - they just hung out, Chase said. "In her last semester there, she started doing some solo guitar, singer-songwriter kind of stuff."
However, when Karen met guitarist Zinner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she remembered her old college buddy, and Chase was invited to join in on the rock 'n' roll takeover they were planning.
Like many of the so-called recent "garage-rock" bands - a label Chase rejects for his band's music - Yeah Yeah Yeahs decided to omit bass.
"The main reason is that there's a good chemistry between the three of us," Chase said. "We didn't want to ruin the mix."
It's a potent mix. Chase's jazz sensibilities (he noted free jazz percussionist Susie Ibarra as an influence) allow him to fill spaces between Zinner's stark "no wave" riffs with accents that are not always obvious to a rocker's ear.
And Zinner has established himself as a primitive guitar great on the level of Gang of Four's Andy Gill, or the late Ricky Wilson of the B-52s.
"It's definitely coming from a less-is-more perspective, and emphasis on simplicity," Chase said of their interplay. "Just making sure the lines breathe."
The focal point, of course, is the band's crazed, tough and endearingly vulnerable frontwoman. Karen O's declarations of lust and hate are mostly powered by hectoring squeals and growls. She also has surprising melodic gifts (showcased on the lovely new single, "Maps," with its unforgettable "Wait/They don't love you like I love you" refrain) that give the music, at times, an urbane flavor reminiscent of Blondie. Her stage performances, naturally, are reputed to be unpredictable and wild.
Unfortunately, that abandon got her hurt in October at a show in Sydney, Australia. "That was a big scare for all of us," Chase said. "She tripped over one of the front monitors, and went head-first off the stage. She hit her head on one of the barriers."
Luckily, Chase said, the injuries were superficial, and she's fine for their two-and-a-half week U.S. tour.
Chase said that after the tour, the band plans to write music and further develop four or five new songs that are being played live. He described them as "a little darker" and "dance-based."
Chase responded to the suggestion that there was something very definitively "New York" about Yeah Yeah Yeahs' sound by zeroing in on its "tongue-in-cheek" aspects.
"We're always 100 percent sincere, but always 100 percent sarcastic at the same time," Chase said. "I think that gives us our New York attitude - sort of like spunky. Sort of like classy and trashy at the same time."