Customer Reviews
Amazing!!! - By: Mr. Marc Macinnes, 22 Aug 2008 
This was the first album I bought by the "Yeah Yeah Yeahs". It is a great album with a difined mixture between the tracks. Some are full of energy & others are very emotional. Allin all it is a great album & covinced me to buy the other albums of thiers.
Horribly disappointing second album - By: Lance Dior, 20 Dec 2007 
OK, so I'll get dozens of people clicking the "unhelpful vote" button, but hear me out!
I loved this band when they started out. I thought they were the most exciting US indie band to emergein a long long time, BUT...the bottom line is this - this album is simply nowhere near as good as the debut "Master" EP or the "Fever To Tell" album. It just isn't.
In fact, it hardly even sounds like the same band (with the possible exceptions of "Gold Lion" & "Cheated Hearts"). Other than that, it all sounds very very samey & desperately uninispired. If people want to misinterpret that as "development" or "maturity", then fine. What "Show Your Bones" certainly is not, is exciting. Which is what I thought this band were all about.
Growing Old Gracefully - By: Jim Dubh, 16 Jul 2007 
"Fever to Tell" was a raw, rowdy, & rambunctious album that demanded your attention. It was an album of manical drumming, booming reverb, & lead vocals that shrieked & shrilled. Ironically, although not irrelevant to this review, its most accessible song "Maps" would prove to be the one that guided the album into the charted waters of popular acclaim.
Why is this relevant? Because The YYYs second full-length album, "Show Your Bones", is a much more mature & structured effort. O's vocals are stripped back, Chase's drumming is keptin check, & Zinner's guitar-playing sticks to the script. So the band's gone & grown up - time to consign them to the footnotes of early 21st century music? Far from it! This is a sophomore album that will give the band much wider appeal, but should keep many earlier fans tuned into what they have to offer.
You could argue that "Maps" provides the bridge between the two albums. However, from the acoustic & gently sung opening bars of "Gold Lion", listeners know that they arein for something new here. The title of the song is a reference to the Gold Prize for Best Use of Music at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, which an Adidas television commercial featuring "Hello Tomorrow," written by Show Your Bones co-producer Squeak E. Clean, with vocals by O, wonin 2005. Indeed, the opening lines of this song perhaps suggest some anguish at the loss of indie credibility that such mainstream success may bring:
Gold lion's gonna tell me where the light is, \
Gold lion's gonna tell me where the light is, \
Take our hands out of control, \
Take our hands out of control.
The Pixies are a pervasive influence on the album & fans of Kim Deal's singing will feel very nostalgic when listening to "Way Out" - just listen to how O sings the line "The face ain't making what the mouth needs"!
The other standout song on the album is "Cheated Heart". It has a good hook that O's vocals dance over nicely & the refrain of "I think that I'm bigger than the sound" is instantly recognisable. The song itself appears to be about a relationship about to take a "time out", with the suggestion that both may have a bit on the side. Great if you can get it, I always maintain!
Another track that catches the attenion lyrically is "Warrior", which appears to be about the hardship of being a band on the road, trying to live up to expectations:
Trouble at home \
Travel the way you say \
"The road don't like me" \
Travel it all, travel it all away \
"The road's gonna get on me" \
And I'm small \
The road's gonna get on me \
Well if it gets it all \
The road's gonna end on me
Other tunes well worth hearing are "Honeybear", "Dudley", & "Turn Into". However, a pleasing feature of this album is how different each song sounds from the rest & they all grow on you with a couple of listens.
Not a band that will necessarily write lyrics you then burn into your brain. However, this is an album that will survive frequent playing. If this is the YYYs gone mainstream, then welcome to the club.
Boring - By: YoungB, 24 Feb 2007 I find Yeah Yeah Yeahs very boring, one listen is enough, i doubt that i will ever listen to this again as it all sounds the same as all the pop/rock music that comes out these days.
All songs just wash over you, meaning nothing & doing nothing. None move you or really make you get into the music, which you really need when making a rock/pop album.
Maybe if you are really into this type of music you would love it, but if you are just vaguely interested init, which is what i am, then i would definately avoid this, but pick up just to experiment with the band, you never know, you might really feel them.
Surprisingly good, but a little samey - By: M. Wilcox, 27 Jan 2007 I bought this album as part of a new-year resolution to try random stuff that I normally wouldn't. Punk is not my 'thing', & it's been quite a while since I last listened to guitar lead thrashy rock stuff. Possibly the most similar thingin my back-catalog would be the first Garbage album - which should give you some guidance as to where I'm coming at this album from.
I was pleasantly surprised by Show Your Bones. It's got an energy that's quite captivating, & doesn't take itself too seriously or too flippantly. Phenomena is my favorite track, easily accessible & refusing to budge from my head all day after hearing it.
I've found the album managing to appearin my CD player a surprising number of times, but unfortunately it doesn't sustain my attention all the way through, which is disappointing given the strong opening tracks. By the eighth or ninth track I've gotten a little bored from a lack of variationin the sound (there's only so many ways to play music where the tone of the guitars, singing, & constant cymbals never change).
An album worth getting to for sure, but not one of my favorites.
