Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz! (2009)

“Get your leather on”. Yeah Yeah Yeahs are playful chameleons. Its Blitz! is frankly commercial. Not necessarily in a bad way, but in a yeah-this-is-a-fun-listen-if-only-for-half-an-hour-before-I-go-and-make-myself-some-noodles kind of way.

“Zero” is fashionable. “Soft Shock” hops delightfully “in your room, in my room, in your room, in my room”. It’s coloured sweetly and is not without its warm charm. “Skeletons” is a Coldplay anthem with womanly vocals, lyrics about the “sky” and a love which Karen O in pleading with, “love, don’t cry”. It’s radio-ready or perhaps could close an episode of Grey’s Anatomy; Katherine Heigl comes to terms with a man’s solemn departure (shot in slow motion naturally).

“Dull Life” opens awkwardly, with Karen’s vocals attempting to align with the guitar riffs. On an album as mediocre as It’s Blitz!, reciting over and over that “it’s a dull life” wasn’t a wise decision. “Shame and Fortune” attempts to be topical, but I call filler. “Dragon Queen”? Filler. Apart from “Hysteric”, which is a cheerful pop ditty, It’s Blitz! is more often It’s Shitz. When did the Yeah Yeah Yeahs become so complacent?

It’s Blitz! is a movie trailer, it’s short and thrilling but it leaves you in anticipation. It never amounts to much more than being a by-the-numbers pop-lectr-unk record. Sorry guys, I think I’ll keep my leather off.

56
(58 - SM)
Combined Rating = 57

David Bowie - Diamond Dogs (1974)

Part 3 of the glam Bowie trilogy:

After the full-bodied avant-garde flourishes of Aladdin Sane, the wispiness of the production here is a huge disappointment- it’s even more noticeable than on Ziggy. Bowie, handling production duties, gives himself little to work with. A lethargic, substance-ridden corpse vaguely resembling Ziggy Stardust (or the barely re-branded Halloween Jack) had sacked his spiders and decided to play guitar here, and he’s also seemingly decided to stop singing. Efforts to make his bored-sounding vocals at all compelling on the title track include the use of a cheese-grater-esque vocal filter (try singing into moving fan blades- you’ll get much the same effect).

There are some interesting songs here- notably the melancholic “Sweet Thing”, scrapped stage number “1984’”and glam classic “Rebel Rebel”- but the rest of the album is marred by unenergetic performances and just functional guitar work (it has recently become apparent that the album’s one memorable lick- the riff from “Rebel Rebel”- may well have been, to an uncertain extent, appropriated from Jayne County). The flawed humanity of the last two albums has been replaced with a wall of aesthetic and lyrical cynicism (“As the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy thoroughfare … Like packs of dogs assaulting the glass fronts of Love-Me Avenue”), delivered with little conviction or excitement.

There are bits and pieces to be salvaged here, and opening monologue “Future Legend” is good for a campy sci-fi laugh (Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats/And ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes)- but overall this Diamond Dog is a tired old mongrel- time for a signature metamorphosis, David.

59