(Music) The Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Show Your Bones"

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs second LP, “Show Your Bones” is a beautiful mess of an album. What is immediately noticeable on this album is the influx of acoustic guitars that flood and fill out the album quite nicely. But though it’s a welcome addition to the electric-guitar madness that has become the Yeah Yeah Yeahs signature, it’s still a flood. And floods are bad.

“Show Your Bones” begins as a heavily produced piece of rock greatness. The band manages to play as a unit without one member out-shining the other. It’s great! It’s a band working as a band, not relying on a sole-member. As a result, Karen O just seems to fit into the music that her bandmates have created, like the missing piece to a puzzle. It’s a beautiful chunk of music.

However, as the album progresses, this all falls apart. When Karen O sings “I think I’m bigger than the sound,” well, she is. The second half of the album is largely underproduced and features O’s vocals becoming harsher, tougher to deal with. While she is capable of singing at the level of Metric’s Emily Haines, she opts to screech her way through many of the album’s later tracks over minimal instrumentation. By the way, the songs “The Sweets” “Warrior” and “Turn Into” are back to back to back near clones of each other. Like a bad Linkin Park song, they all follow the same formula: start of with soft acoustics, end the song in blazing electric and insane drums. And while it works once, it is excused when done twice, and garbage the third time through, especially when done back to back to back. Despite these drawbacks the album ends in a blaze of hell fire with the song “Déjà vu,” a song that can only be described with the word “wow.”

Though it really falls apart towards the end, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Show Your Bones” is a fairly decent showing from a band that is sure to have many good years ahead of ‘em. When they are good, they are really good. They capture rock music at it’s core, choke it, and leave it beat up in the street. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs may very well be the future of mainstream rock…well, we can only hope so.

Recommended for fans of rock music, especially chick rock. Oh, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs fans too.

Key Tracks:

1. Gold Lion
2. Fancy
3. Mysteries
4. Déjà vu

3 out of 5 Stars