If the Yeah Yeah Yeahs conquered pop perfection on their past couple of records, it seems that now they’re in the market to become Rock Gods. Slowly and carefully unfolding with ominously funky bass and Karen O’s alternating sweet and irreverent narration of bedding an angel (“ Fallin’ for a guy/ Who fell down from the sky”), it grows more intense by the moment, climaxing with a gospel choir to sing the song out in a callback to The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” It’s a huge song, eschewing subtlety for something that aims high - high enough to canoodle with seraphim. Then came “ Sacrilege.” Released earlier this year, the band’s first single from fourth album Mosquito served to highlight some even loftier ambitions for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
But with “Maps” as a guiding light, Karen O, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase began to focus more intently on sharpening their hooks and shaping their pop sensibility, delivering a consistently affecting and often soaring set of singles like “Cheated Hearts,” “Turn Into,” “Zero” and “Skeletons.” The road from art punks to pop dynamos, for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, turned out to be a reasonably short one. Not that that album - or 2006’s Show Your Bones or 2009’s It’s Blitz! for that matter - didn’t have some suitably skronky scuzz punk of its own. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ runaway hit from 2003’s Fever To Tell, “Maps” displayed a side of the New York City group of which the noisy scuzz punk of their earlier EPs gave scarcely any indication. Ten years later, it’s safe to say that “ Maps” wasn’t a fluke.
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