In 2000, Karen O, a Tisch transfer student, was as self-assured as any newly-minted New Yorker. So she and guitarist Nick Zinner thought of a band name and a logo before they had written any songs, as they reveal on one of this album's interview tracks. After they'd written some (very good) songs, their reputations-- Nick Zinner's cool, Karen O's beer-soaked bravado-- still preceded their records. But then YYYs released "Maps". Then they became less fashionable but no less good. And they matured, even before Karen O did the most New York thing of all: move to L.A.
This iTunes collection spans from their first EP to Its Blitz!, and it shows a band willing to adapt and change without regrets or nostalgia for its past. That YYYs are ready to have a greatest hits album pangs their older fans more than the band themselves. They don't hate getting older, or ever being that young.
That's most apparent from their choices and interviews here, beginning with an acoustic version of their debut EP's "Our Time". Abrupt and bluesy, clunky and amateur, it's also got a swagger that none of their subsequent songs matches-- not that the band wants them to. By their debut LP, YYYs were already a different band. "I was feeling a little bit more aversion to the more rockish, noisy, kinda histrionic vocals, because I wasn't relating to it as a 27-year-old or 26-year-old as well as I did when I was 21 or 22," Karen O explained to Pitchfork in an interview. "And I felt like the angst fizzled out when we were writing this album, and it was more kinda like a brewing sort of... I don't know what it was." So "Our Time"'s makeover is YYYs' makeover.
Three of the five acoustic versions are from It's Blitz: "Runaway", which Karen describes as "epic" in one of the iTunes interviews, melts into a torch song, while "Hysteric" takes on a spacious, ponderous quality that its spare melody barely supports. Breaking from the cliché of the solemn acoustic version, It's Blitz!'s "Dull Life" becomes an even better stomper, one that, as Karen O says in her interview still has "that YYYs energy."
The interview portions are far too short, and even shorter than you think, since the band hem when explaining their songs. Karen O ends her answers in a trailing, adolescent "so...." But what's fascinating is their phrase "that YYYs energy." This attitude is exactly what's kept them sane, and kept them good. Since YYYs define themselves not in terms of a particular sound or instrumentation, but rather "energies," the supposed leaps they've made-- from sweaty punk band to doe-eyed balladeers to electronic pied pipers-- really seem like iterations of the same band, different outfits on the same body.
This may be what they mean when they hope to be, "bigger than the sound," as Karen O sings on their rousing "Cheated Hearts" (here in its original form). Other songs ("Y Control", "Gold Lion", "Down Boy", "Heads Will Roll") appear in their original versions. Their best song here and everywhere else, is still "Maps", a song that's come to stand for YYYs in a way that transcends even a "signature song"--more than a hit, it's bound to the band DNA. They back up Zinner's acoustic guitar with violins as they did for their Radio City Music Hall gig. Writing it was, as Karen O says, "a moment in time for us."
A "moment in time" for them, for their fans. But this collection includes YYYs singles too familiar to be worth re-purchasing. As Tom Breihan said, all the acoustic versions can be purchased separately via iTunes for $5.25. When you price music by the song, you start to think cost per track; and in this case the product only justifies the price if this is your first YYYs album. Ever.
That said, the interviews are worth it, though the band can't talk about themselves for any length. You really do have to marvel at Karen O, though. In her 2005 interview with The Believer, she said, "I'm fully putting myself out there for the people and for the sake of trying to lure them into the experience and out of... detachment." It's the sort of platitude you expect from a front woman of Karen O's consummate skill and charisma, and yet it's her sheer ability as a communicator and perpetual optimist that is the real source of YYYs "energy."
