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Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Is Is (Interscope)

By Tony Ware

Published on August 14, 2007 at 3:48pm

The best Yeah Yeah Yeahs songs have always felt like a balling or a brawling, and oftentimes both. Since emerging in 2000, the serrated sleaze-rockin' trio of vamping singer Karen O, bassy guitarist Nick Zinner, and primal drummer Brian Chase has gangbanged a catalog of turn-ons and fuck-offs.

Where:

The Fillmore

Details:

Tuesday, Aug. 21, at 9 p.m. Admission is $27.50; call 346-6000 or visit www.thefillmore.com for more info.

Subject(s):

Yeah Yeah Yeahs by Tony Ware

The band's new EP, Is Is, offers similarly brisk thrusts and song swatches to 2003's Fever to Tell. Is Is features five "new" studio tracks originally honed on tour and semi-documented on the 2004 performance DVD Tell Me What Rockers to Swallow. And as such it embodies the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' phantasms and orgasms: Throughout, Zinner's taut guitar babbles as if in the throes of both, and at its best ("Kiss Kiss," "Isis") it's a predator buffeting from all sides. Karen O punctuates the tension with exclamations that refrain from her usual tendency to leave little to the imagination. Much of the EP falls on Fever to Tell's squirrelly scrunches, but the spurts of spindly riffs throughout "Rockers to Shallow" and "10x10" are a formula that comes across thin.

Is Is shows the feral potential the Yeah Yeah Yeahs used to have. As for what the band is now, its sound is a now-familiar phenom needing further evolution.

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