Most Popular
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7-Up vs. Coke Part 2
Heir to a fortune, Andrew Gladney went from John Burroughs to Yale and came home to found the dot-com darling Savvis Inc. Then he squandered it all. The spectacular flameout of a St. Louis soft-drink scion.
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Red Alert: Everything they really don't want you to know about those pesky traffic-light cameras
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Ludo is fired up and ready to play on the national stage
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Curious Gorge: Ian tests the animal magnetism of Three Monkeys
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Feel a Draught?: Tigín opens an outpost in a Hampton Inn downtown? O'Really!
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Seeing Red: Partners battle over a Wash. Ave. eatery's ownership (9)
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Red Alert: Everything they really don't want you to know about those pesky traffic-light cameras (9)
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7-Up vs. Coke Part 2 (6)
Heir to a fortune, Andrew Gladney went from John Burroughs to Yale and came home to found the dot-com darling Savvis Inc. Then he squandered it all. The spectacular flameout of a St. Louis soft-drink scion.
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Will Ian flip for the Original Pancake House? (4)
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Is a Wash. U. dean destroying alumni records and making unjust department cuts? (3)
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Have two Nirvana producers helped create the next Metallica?
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"The Sex Song": Not TASTiSKANK's homage to Matthew McConaughey
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Bret Michaels (sort of) talks dirty to RFT
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The 75s make an extra-fancy splash with its debut record
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Producer nonpareil Pharrell Williams is happy to be just one of the band again
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Go! 3/7-3/9
06:00PM 03/07/08 -
R.E.M. Accelerate: An Advance Review and Song-by-Song Analysis of the Band's New Album
04:06AM 03/08/08 -
Your Weekly St. Louis Food Blog Digest
03:45PM 03/07/08 -
This Is Hawkwind -- Do Not Panic
06:08PM 11/09/07
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Recent Articles By Tony Ware
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Beat Generation
Electronic music: the year in review
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Le Tigre
This Island (Strummer/Universal)
National Features
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Houston Press
"It Was Like an Armageddon Movie"
For days after Hurricane Rita, a Texas prison was hell on earth.
By Chris Vogel -
SF Weekly
The Candidate
Our columnist knows Ralph Nader's running mate all too well.
By Matt Smith -
The Pitch
How Not To Be a Rap Star
First of all, lay off the Ecstasy.
By Nadia Pflaum -
Village Voice
Project Runaway
What becomes a gossip columnist most?
By Michael Musto
The best Yeah Yeah Yeahs songs have always felt like a balling or a brawling — if not 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. 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 Swallow" 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.
