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Review & Setlist: Chaos reigned – in a good way – as Yeah Yeah Yeahs took over MGM Music Hall
The band returned to Boston at long last after their last-minute cancellation at this year's Boston Calling.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with SASAMI, at MGM Music Hall at Fenway, Monday, Nov. 6.
When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs burst out of New York City and into public consciousness in 2003 with the release of their debut album Fever To Tell, frontwoman Karen O came across like a postmillennial Cyndi Lauper, all thrift-store boho chic as she spat out odes to self-actualization and the corrupting influence of money. But at her core, O was an open-hearted romantic — also just like Lauper — which made it easier to root for her, guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase than some of their Gotham compatriots who took more arch perspectives on matters of the heart.
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That empathetic relatability was still in evidence at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway on Monday, when the band returned to Boston at long last after their last-minute cancellation at this year’s Boston Calling due to illness.
The show began with the slow momentum of “Spitting Off The Edge Of The World,” conveying a sense of scale as O — clad in a Manos: The Hands Of Fate-style robe fitted out with sparkly red fringe and matching headgear — swanned grandly around the stage like a Siouxsie Sioux that was approachable rather than imperious. The robe and headgear were both gone by the end of following song “Cheated Hearts,” leaving O to romp around the stage for the rest of the performance in the Nudie-suit equivalent of a leotard. By then, chaos had started creeping in, leading to the wild, artsy fury of “Pin.”
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The Yeah Yeah Yeahs whipped up that wave in song after song. From the caustic, siren-like pings that kicked it off, “Y Control” became a whooping gallop, with Zinner playing his guitar like he was battling a wind tunnel. “Heads Will Roll” was a call to dance with threats of violence, while sharp guitar strums were keyed to the drum thud of “Gold Lion” as O put her whole body into the song.
And with Zinner ripping out a guttural, dead-simple guitar line and Chase beaming as he pounded the postpunk dance beat of “Date With The Night,” O shrieked, whispered and pleaded, throwing and smashing the microphone on the stage and shoving it down the front of her leotard into her crotch before fishing it back out and giving it to an audience member.
For a band that was incubated at a time and place where credibility was currency, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs remain refreshingly unpure; electronic enhancement was the order of the day, with drum pads, supplemental tracks (sometimes visibly performed by auxiliary guitarist/keyboardist Imaad Wasif, sometimes not) and plenty of effects coloring Zinner’s guitar and Chase’s drums. Occasionally it was as subtle as the unseen shakers augmenting the drums to give “Shame And Fortune” a sense of forward-moving ominousness. And sometimes all the instruments felt deliberately artificial, as in the disco-adjacent ticky-tacky beat of “Different Today.”
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Despite the fact that O’s explicit promise to slow things down simply resulted in the midtempo “Soft Shock,” the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were indeed capable of dialing back from a frenzy. Sometimes it was as simple as holding for effect, letting the blippy opening throb of “Zero” run long enough to build up energy before kicking off the song proper, or holding stock-still — Chase standing with a drumstick in the air, O holding a microphone above her head with both hands — in the middle of “Date With The Night” until the audience lost their minds.
Elsewhere, they pulled off a pocket epic in “Burning,” and “Blacktop” was spacious and pushed forward with cathedral organ over electronic drums. And from Zinner’s high tremolo picking atop Chase’s thumping roll, “Maps” had long since transcended its specific, titular subject to become applicable to all open hearts, ending with O holding her microphone up to hers.
Walking the line between benevolently confrontational and cheerfully pandering, opener SASAMI brought both big theatre-kid energy and fierce vulnerability to what she dubbed her “experimental, horny set.” A frayed nerve that was also an overcaffeinated chatterbox, she performed solo to synth-pop backing tracks with electric guitar occasionally in hand, coming off like Caroline Polachek with crunch.
Setlist for Yeah Yeah Yeahs at MGM Music Hall at Fenway, Nov. 6, 2023
- Spitting Off The Edge Of The World
- Cheated Hearts
- Pin
- Shame and Fortune
- Burning
- Zero
- Soft Shock
- Blacktop
- Different Today
- Gold Lion
- Turn Into
- Maps
- Heads Will Roll
ENCORE:
- Poor Song
- Y Control
- Date With The Night
Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter/X @spacecitymarc.
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