Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- Mosquito

this mosquito truly sucks

don't scratch this itch, for mosquito

it don't draw blood

About to see them in Ventura. A surprisingly young crowd here tonight.

Hoped they had its blitz on vinyl, but it's all mosquito here tonight. Worth $17? The enthusiasm for this record seems low itt.

This cover is awful. Would prbly buy if the cover was not incredibles baby in grasp of mosquito.

listening to this for the first time just now, so far it's pretty bad-ass (1.5 songs in)

i agree sufjan. the cover is so bad it is honestly hard to not have it unfavorably influence my experience of the album, which i actually like a lot, especially "sacrilege."

sacrilege - i like this! sounds relaxed and loose, inhabitable in a way they haven't since maybe forever. hazy production and gospel vocals set up expectations that this is gonna be an exile move: dark, rootsy, unpop. i'm okay with that. i mostly love it's blitz! and like some stuff prior, but have never been fully on board with the yeah yeah yeahs. even starting with fever to tell, i've had the sense of something overconsidered, overdesigned, sculpted to within an inch of its life. the songs have sounded not like cool places they stumbled into, but like "cool spaces" they sat down and decided to construct. this feels much more natural.

subway - like this, too. similar reasons. nice vibe, faraway, stoned and unfussed. would hang.

mosquito - awesome. hilarious, good energy, the kind of shit i wish they'd onto after the first couple EPs (dialing down the intensity but keeping the energy). no great shakes, but i love the percussion and the spacey breakdown.

under the earth - okay, you're all crazy, this album is fantastic. love the bassline, drumming, falsetto vocals, dub noises, those "aaahs" that crop up about three minutes in (!), lyrics, lidded sway. hasn't been a big, standout pop move on the album yet, but i'll take a welcoming expanse in trade. on the first pass, i'm digging this a good deal more than i was the new knife.

slave - damn. if this is underdeveloped, i'm glad they quit where they did. reminds me of the stones' disco period and bowie/moroder's "cat people". and the album as a whole maybe of sandinista!. i could listen to this shit for days. might not stick in my head afterwards, but i'd have a good time.

these paths - okay, now i get the "underdeveloped" charges. this does sound like dubbed-out filler. still like it, but the energy flags (if not the vibe). lol, i thought she was saying "pants" at first. gets kind of lovely towards the end, kind of corny too.

area 52 - goofy shit, maybe too much so for it's own good, maybe not. i get the album cover now. like this and "mosquito" are supposed to be the touchstones. enjoyable, but i wish the arrangement and production here were a little more spacious, leave some room to bang, like the first b-52's album.

i desist. this is weird, lazy and good. along with it's blitz! probably my favorite yyy's. i appreciate the vacation they seem to be taking from big, tough power moves. and it's nice hearing from doctor octagon again. the poignant uplift stretch at the end of the album seems to betray the "concept", and isn't as strong as the "runaway" / "hysteric" / "little shadow" clutch at the end of it's blitz!, but i dig it okay. "wedding song" is particularly nice.

p.s. - i don't get the hate directed at buried alive. one of my favorite tracks here. relistening to it, i'm kind of tripping on how 90s this album really is, though. recalls "radio song" and "kool thing" more than, say, fall out boy flirting with rap/r&b. and the dubbiness reminds me of fringe downtempo stuff like dj spooky's free kitten remix.

and on the second pass, "always" and "despair" can go jump. the album really stumbles in the home stretch, which is a problem, but i'm very happy with the 9 songs i'll keep.

basically feel as contenderizer. i like how many different kinds of crawl are on here.

xpost That is the exact opposite of how I see this album, the last three tracks are the only ones I'm going to end up keeping on my itunes. It's not that the rest of it is terrible it just sounds so rushed and lacking the excitement or energy that made the first album so great. It's Blitz was close to being perfect for me and this feels like a pretty big disappointment. It feels like they really didn't know what kind of record to make so they just tried a bunch of songs in the style of their previous albums but with weaker tunes.

To me Sacrilege just sounds like an average Yeah Yeah Yeahs song but with a choir thrown in to try and give it some kind of edge, it doesn't it just sounds clumsy and over the top but in a bad way. The title track is a poor attempt at doing a Fever to Tell style song, it just isn't as fun as it should be. Most of the other tracks are just really forgettable.

The last three songs are just full of heart which is I guess what I'm after from them now. As I mentioned earlier in the thread I like their mellow side a lot more these days. Cheated Hearts, Turns Into, Softshock, Skeletons Runaway and Little Shadow are my favourite songs of theirs.

Great show. The mosquito songs translated well live. They opened with sacrilege. Ended up buying the vinyl. Heads will roll was the highlight for me. I know I'm 10 years behind you music geniuses in pointing this out, but the metal screams paired with the beautiful bridge in that song sum up the greatness of Karen o and this band for me

Under the Earth is probably my favorite track on the album.

a lot of this stuff could probably be complicated and rescued live

― emo canon in twee major (BradNelson), Tuesday, April 16, 2013 9:37 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was my experience. But I wasn't really a YYYs fan before seeing them live last night, so all of their recorded material has improved for me. I did find that Mosquito songs sounded great live, while some older songs that I knew, e.g. Zero, were surprisingly mediocre in comparison.

i agree sufjan. the cover is so bad it is honestly hard to not have it unfavorably influence my experience of the album, which i actually like a lot, especially "sacrilege."

― authentically inauthentic (Pat Finn), Tuesday, April 16, 2013 8:55 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It was the album release party, so they gave me a signed poster with the album cover on it at the merch table. I can't wait to frame it for hanging in my storage unit.

Under the Earth is probably my favorite track on the album.

― Johnny Fever, Tuesday, April 16, 2013 11:22 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Under the Earth is a jam. Sounds like an ESG track.

this is probably not a great album but I've listened to it more than half of what's "better" in 2013? then again I fuck with pretty much any late-'90s rock album like this one

Everything that people are moaning about in here just makes me want to hear this more, I think.

Haha on the last album I defended the lyrics as "impressionist", that you don't really need to listen to them or understand them, that they create a vibe that furthers the particular drive of a particular song and that's all they do, and that's fine, it's like her voice is more like another instrument than something that's conveying structured thought, and I still believe this; this time around I sort of want to defend the entire songs themselves as impressionist, that they create a sort of vibe but don't imprint themselves on the mind, but I don't think I'll believe this for longer than it takes to write this post

That said I really like this record so far, having heard the first four songs

on my playthrough upthread I bailed after the first four songs because I was super tired, but I loved the first four songs

love Slave! love those guitar sounds, how they come piercing through and snap it all into higher focus, the vocals suddenly more upfront too. These Paths ... not so great imo

This is not abysmal. I even dig Dr Octagon's part.

I liked or loved everything up through "Despair", at which point I left the office to grab lunch and this album

about to rip it to my work computer

once you rip it you can hang the cover art on your wall

Hang it directly over the face of your Ecce Homo reproduction

I hung it up and wrote my boss' name under it.

we'll start the bidding at 0.1 BTC
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1484956/yyys_poster_small.jpg

well, I watched the short. So the album art did well for the artist. http://vimeo.com/channels/shimbefilms

It's not abysmal, just kind of dull. There's a sort of career drift moment going on, the first three albums were all super-focused, even when the songs weren't the best there was a sense that the band had a vision of what they were trying to accomplish. I don't get that sense here, there's a feeling of a band throwing a lot of things against the wall and seeing what sticks. It lacks both the emotional heft and the explosive dynamism of their first few records.

Also the first three albums SOUNDED amazing, the production on this one is so scratchy and poor. I dunno, there's a general sense of a band who don't quite know what to do with themselves - most bands get there after a while.

i don't know what the details are, but it SOUNDS like the kind of thing a band puts out when they want to get out of a contract and owe the label one more album. "oh hey we have this one great song and found some demos lying around, here you go"

I had that same suspicion upthread. They may be ready to climb back down to the indie ranks.

matt, lex and johnny may be 100% otm about "career drift", lack of focus, contract fulfillment, poor production and so on. part of what i like about this album, though, is that haze of indecision. it's not terribly insistent, even when playing punk or pop. everything about mosquito is slack, stoned, dgaf. psychedelic and exploratory where in the past they've typically been quite clear and direct. that's probably not gonna cement their place in the pop firmament, but it's not by any means a less valid approach.

i completely understand why people who dug the sense of goal-accomplishment (emotional heft and dynamicism or w/e) matt mentions would be put off. but up to this point, i always found something about their approach a little suffocating and impenetrable. this album is a lot more casually approachable and genuinely enjoyable. "inhabitable", like i said upthread.

I agree with Contenderizer - this is not aiming to win any best album of the year poll but just like a lot more humble and 'lets just enjoy' each others company and see what happens type deal. There is a refreshing lack of an overall coherence - more about process than endless dithering about finessing an end product or trying to advance a career to the'next level'.

Basically everyone here is overanalyzing and this album bangs

settled

Or people just expected a lot more from them four years after the last album. Why shouldn't they be aiming to make the album of the year? They did last time and they got very close.

whose year though? mine, yours, theirs, pitchfork's? it's not like there's one clear way to go about these things. since i've been listening to her lately, i'm thinking of mosquito as a ph harvey move: sideways, away from both expectations and "commercial potential", like is this desire? or white chalk.

pop is a kind of treadmill. bands that show themselves capable of producing the big time rush are forever after held to that standard, with any deviation from pop immediacy deemed a disappointment if not an outright failure. i understand the impulse. i'm a bit disappointed in the new knife album - not because it's weird and unpop, but because they seem to have abandoned melody and even song. i find it hard to imagine that anyone able to write "marble house" and "from off to on" would spurn that gift in favor of clanging abstraction. but yeah yeah yeahs haven't ditched the tunes. they've just softened them up a bit, approached them from different directions. the hooks are still there, just blurred a little.

Sadly I think this is their Uh Huh Her. Gavin summed up that album pretty well on her voting thread.

I remember a friend saying that Uh Huh Her sounded like she'd just gone and recorded two or three songs in the style of each of her previous albums and thrown them together, which I thought was pretty otm.

― Gavin, Leeds

That's how I feel about Mosquito. Is This Desire and White Chalk are both as you say a move sideways but both great albums where she really took risks. Uh Huh Her to me sounded very tired and rushed even though it was almost four years after her last album. That remains the only album of hers I don't actually have much time for and right now that's how I feel about Mosquito, they hadn't really put a foot wrong until now. They didn't take many risks on this album and the ones they did take are not that interesting to me, using a choir and rapper just isn't that exciting.

What's strange is how much more I'm enjoying the new Strokes album but that is an album where the band have taken a sideways step, kept it interesting and remembered how to write great songs again (they only managed three on the last album)

I'm not writing Yeah Yeah Yeahs off I just think they have a high standard and most of this album just isn't good enough. I have no need to listen to this album (I've given it a fair chance) when I can listen to the three great albums they already have.

Played this for 2 new sets of ears tonight and they loved it. They were a bit distracted though so DJP otm basically

See I can't say that this record is going to be a life long favourite of mine but I just don't get the vehemence and the 'I never need to listen to this ever again' reaction.... its not like it's Nickleback or Beach House. People seem to need immediate impact and some sort of chest swelling zeitgeist moment to give a record any credit. If you liked the band previously I don't see why you wouldn't find something to like on this one - the only thing is they have dialled back the careerist 'must break MTV' ambitions and just tried to make some music on their own terms.

Beach House are awesome. Please.

Vampire Weekend?

No. Len. The answer is Len.

OK Good. Len then.

A few listens in on this now, the lead 1-2 punch is just as great as "Zero"/"Heads Will Roll" which basically means that by this time next year I will have "Sacrilege" and "Subway" deep in my bones and feel little to no need to listen to them outside of when they pop up on random shuffle, at which point I will remember that I fucking love them.

"Sacrilege" still sounds like an ambitious misfire, but overall I like this a fair bit, especially "Wedding Song," "Buried Alive," and "Slave."

I love the bits of Santigold's "GO!" that fade in and out of "Under the Earth"

(nb: I realize that it is not necessarily a sample but rather the way the echo and reverb evoke "GO!", which Karen was on)

this album owns and i like that the liner notes are 100% committed to the ghastly art (closeups of proboscis, demonic eyes, baby's face, etc.)