Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Festival Hall, Melbourne
Thursday 29th December, 2009

Yeah Yeah Yeahs were due onstage at 9.15pm tonight. At exactly 9.15, I was sitting aboard a plane rolling slowly towards Melbourne airport, after having landed on a woefully delayed flight. (Virgin Blue, for the record). This fact, my friends, is of little use to us now.

In the next half an hour I managed to collect luggage, drive home and then make it to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs show at Festival Hall, just in time to lamely see the last song ('Zero') of their main set. So while my evenings silliness allows me no way to give you a proper review of the show, here's some thoughts on what we did catch.

- The band are evidently still going with the 'glittery giant eyeball' backdrop (and beach balls) schtick that they've been displaying at their shows since the release of It's Blitz!. That's the annoying thing about the internet. It's hard to be thrilled at a spectacle when you've already seen umpteen YouTube clips and festival photos in the months prior. Still, the thing does creates a suitably bizarre and sparkly backdrop for Karen O to gyrate out of front of. And takes the focus off Festival Hall's decrepit, filthy white ceiling. The seething mass of people on the floor sure aren't looking anywhere else.

- Maybe it was my position but the sound was off. In 2007 at their Forum Theatre show in 2007 on their Show Your Bones tour, the band sounded huge. Ferocious, even . Here it was a washy, ill-defined mess. And it didn't help none that Nick Zinner's guitar was out of tune for the first song of the encore 'Y-Control'.

- I get that playing your biggest song would become a chore. I get that it's fun to deviate from the recorded versions. But this slowed down, boring acoustic take on 'Maps', (the same version that they played on their last trip here) illustrates that sometimes changing a song around can hollow it of anything that ever made it amazing. Let alone any good. 

- They finish the night off with 'Date With The Night', and after the weak anti-climax of 'Maps' it's a reminder that this band can be thrilling when it wants to. If only we were there to see it.

(Pics: Tim O'Connor)