Karen O and her Yeah Yeah Yeahs used to be an event. 20 years ago, the native South Korean and trained New Yorker sounded as if she were sticking chewing gum in the carefully arranged shaky hairstyles of the leather jacket boys of the Strokes generation, whose post-punk revival her own band was also credited with: wild and improbable, simple and raw in the sense of the Zeitgeist and yet very unique.
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After MOSQUITO (2013) the band fell silent – only to celebrate a comeback with COOL IT DOWN, which is titled with a pretty dizzy label. Because you hardly get really warm with the eight pieces. The opening song “Spitting Off The Edge Of The World” has the wonderful Perfume Genius singing along, but as minus times minus equals plus, the grandeur of these two diametrically opposed characters seem to strangely neutralize each other.
The result is a multipurpose hall-sized synthesizer rock song that sets the tone for everything that is yet to come. And that means: even more synthesizer rock songs inflated to multi-purpose hall-sized emotional monsters that neither point to the future nor remind you of what made this band once an event.
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Three fantastic records this week: Hercules & Love Affairs new album IN AMBER, UGLY SEASON by Perfume Genius and UP AND AWAY by Σtella.
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COOL IT DOWN is scheduled to be released almost ten years after its predecessor MOSQUITO.
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Their fourth and still current record MOSQUITO was released in 2013.