Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz

Electro-pop receives vote-of-confidence from rock royalty

Having threatened it for most of the past 18 months, the synthesiser has finally usurped the guitar as the sound of serious pop music. When a band so knowingly, devotedly punky as Yeah Yeah Yeahs ditches blazing riffs for electronica soundscapes, the mark of victory has been reached: rock is dead. And it’s never sounded so fucking alive.

It’s Blitz, then, is the iconic product of the revolution. Taking all the best melodies the band ever produced, toning down the guitars, and committing to mature and intelligent song writing, it’s an album that’s both breathtakingly original, and incontestably rooted in the energy and delivery that characterised the band’s brilliant 2003 debut, Fever to Tell. If Show Your Bones was a hint of things to come, It’s Blitz is the opening of the cocoon and the emergence of the fully-formed new creature; with wings, crackling sparks of pure electro-pop.

From lead single ‘Zero’ and the guaranteed floor-filler ‘Heads Will Roll’ (surely guaranteed to top ‘Song of the Year’ lists come December, with a hook so infectious you’ll be humming it to yourself forever after) via the heartbreaking ‘Soft Shock’, creepingly affecting ‘Runaway’, to the jangling music-meld of ‘Dragon Queen’, It’s Blitz produces standout track after standout track.

It is, though, penultimate offering ‘Hysteric’, channelling all the beauty of the 6-year old ‘Maps’, and a chorus of which 70s era Blondie would have been proud which best displays the true maturity of song-writing which infuses the entire album. Suddenly, Karen O is Debbie Harry delivering 21st Century ‘Atomic’ to the admiring masses. And it couldn’t sound better if it tried.

It’s with understandable trepidation that a fan might approach the idea of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs embracing the fad for the electro route. They were, after all, hardly producing ineffective material with the trusty guitars. Thankfully, with It’s Blitz, Karen O and her painfully cool band-mates manage not only to deliver a frankly brilliant album, but to retain the sound that is so quintessentially YYYs. Long live the synth.

C.S.