Album Review: Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Mosquito

Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Mosquito
Rating: Jeez Lady

From the release of their brilliant debut Fever To Tell, Yeah Yeah Yeahs have always been about subverting expectations. When Karen O and company took a slight slip on the follow up Show Your Bones, many people wrote them off as a one album hit wonder, but few could have expected the brilliant return to greatness (and 180 degree change in sound) with the synth heavy 90s new wave revitalization of It's Blitz!. After a long hiatus, the trio return with their most confounding album yet, Mosquito. From the horrid Garbage Pail Kids meets Nirvana album cover, down to the sequencing of the record, everything seems slightly off this go around. While the darkness that permeated Show Your Bones has aged well over time and given the record higher stature in their catalog, Mosquito is basically a scattershot mess, defying you to enjoy it. Lacking a unifying theme or sound, Mosquito feels more like a collection of B-sides that would have been better off kept in a vault.

"Sacrilege" starts the record off on a high note, its slow build mixture of skittering guitar lines leading into a full on gospel chorus treatment had me with high hopes that the band was taking their sound on to a new level.



After this auspicious start, the full on squealing brake moment begins with the second track "Subway," which trades the heavens of "Sacrilege" for the meandering depths of hell. Almost a funeral dirge, "Subway" is a directionless/formless ambient wasteland of drifting keyboards and guitars over subway noises. At five minutes long, it well overstays its visit. And this becomes a pattern throughout the record, that the tracks either feel like half-baked sketches, or just come across as silly pastiches of better material from the band. The ridiculously silly title track is mainly squealing guitars and 420 bongos under Karen O's campy delivery,



"Area 52" borrows dated surf guitars and marries them with air raid siren keyboards to try and make some sense of the crazy lyrics about aliens,

while "Buried Alive" clatters and crashes about with aimless guitar noodling and an inscrutable rap from Dr. Octogon.

There are some half decent ideas buried within the record that could have told a different story altogether. "These Paths" is a slinky, sexy wash of ambient keyboards and pitch shifted vocal samples that brings some life back to Mosquito,



the delicate strains of synth ballad "Always" is a soothing reminder that Karen O, for all her bluster and antagonism, can portray vulnerability like no one else, and the building guitars of "Despair" drive the track back to the heavenly realms of "Sacrilege."



But overall, nothing is able to put this record on track. Whether, over time its charms reveal themselves, as Show Your Bones did, is not apparent from these listens. Somewhere in this mess is a decent album, but for me it is well hidden, and without different takes or mixes of these songs, it is doubtful my opinion of the record will change. For now, though, Mosquito is a puzzling mess.

Rating Scale:

Chilfos: masterpiece; coolest thing I've heard in ages.

Woof Daddy: excellent; just a hair away from being a masterpiece.

Grrrr: very good; will definitely be considered for my top releases of the year.

Yeah Daddy Make Me Want It: good; definitely invites further listens and piques one's interest for more material.

Meh: not horrible, but certainly not great; could have either been polished, trimmed, or re-thought.

Jeez Lady: what the hell happened? Just plain bad. They should hang their heads in shame and be forced to listen to Lady Gaga ad nauseam as penance.

Tragicistani: so bad, armed villagers with pitchforks and torches should run the artist out of the country for inflicting this abomination on the human race.