Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Brixton Academy, November 15 2004
There is only so much you can tour an album. Only so much you can play the songs over and over until playing them becomes less about recreation and more about an interaction between your brain and your nerve ends. We join Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the tail-end of their promotion for their sleaze ’n’ the morning after debut ‘Fever To Tell’, and they don’t want to push the same set they’ve been playing for two years
First up, though, are The Bravery. They’ve been hailed as our latest saviours and (a) they will look great on magazine covers, (b) ‘Unconditional’ will bounce onto your brain like the bastard child of U2, The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs (c) they might need some more songs like this because for two numbers tonight they come across like a crippled Killers, but (d) luckily they make up for this by playing the warped tremolo fuck-up of ‘Out Of Line’, which is ace.
Next up, The Duke Spirit are – as always – jaw-droppingly fantastic. We don’t need to harp on about this because they’ll surely have a whole review of their own soon where we can shout expletives about how great Leila Moss looks when she’s stomping one foot, raising one arm and making us quiver with those sultry tones. Oooooh. Tonight, ‘Dark Is Light Enough’, ‘Cuts Across The Land’ and ‘Red Weather’ sound like they could fill ten Academies. The biggest and brashest sound of the night.
The only fault you can pick with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ tonight is the sound. When Karen O is off seducing a mike stand, or eyeballing the lighting rig, Nick Zinner’s jerking guitar lines are lost in the cavernous venue. For the most part, though, they stand, or crawl and roll on all fours, and deliver. The new songs promise a great second album: ‘Cheated Hearts’ is led by Zinner’s tremolo’d guitarquakes, before it finally explodes into a faster, uplifting version of ‘Maps’, ‘On Board’ jumps between psychotic, throttling guitar lines and an ascending, electro-thumping chorus and ‘Rockers To Swallow’ sounds like garage rock on fire. They sound nearly great. The main problem is that while Karen is jumping around, you can’t hear a fucking thing she’s singing. Which isn’t so bad when she leads the venue into a mosh-a-thon on ‘Date With The Night’ or ‘Machine’ or ‘Bang’, but it means that when they play the new songs, which take up the main part of the set, they lose their way a little.
Of course, you can’t blame them for wanting to play new stuff, and you know by the time they’re put to record, they’ll sound like unequalled perfection. But tonight is an opportunity for Yeah Yeah Yeahs to put a full-stop on the past and go make another great record. Then we, and Karen, can jump around all over again.
Niall Doherty