Yeah Yeah Yeah’s
“Fever to Tell”
(Interscope)
Hype is a strange thing. There gets to be a point when almost everyone on some level has to say to themselves, “Look, NOTHING is that good. Even the Mona Lisa, the Beatles and Shakespeare aren’t great enough to merit this much attention. This is simply T-double-O much.” Seems like every other year this happens to somebody with underground roots, or at least underground influences, and this year it’s the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s. Like with the Strokes and the White Stripes you have to admit to yourself it isn’t really that bad at all (because most of us really want to not like it after having it crammed down our throats left and right on a daily basis), and in the case of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s I have to say it simply isn’t fair to the band at all.
Their much-anticipated, debut full-length is a good album. This is beyond solid, modern pop played by creative, talented musicians who have excellent ears for well-crafted hooks and perform their songs with energy and grace. I don’t even want to bother with what the album sounds like. If you haven’t heard it or heard them at all then it’s strange you’re even looking at this magazine and I can’t imagine how or why you even picked it up.
If you don’t like them, ask yourself: is it really because of their music? It could just be because you can’t deal with the hype, but if you put all that aside and just listen to the record, I think anyone would have to admit it’s a hell of a lot better than Britney Spears, *NSYNC, Cristina Aguilera or whatever the hell other hopelessly sub-par, de-evolutionary, utterly insulting, culturally cancerous rubbish the corporate powers that be force feed the world 24 hours a day as “music”. You just gotta say “yeah” to that, even if three times might seem like overkill.
