I'm not a major Yeah Yeah Yeahs fan, but of all the acts who came up through the ranks of the New York City signing spree the early part of this decade, i've always found them the ones most worth cheering for. Inventive, accessible, good-looking, effortlessly sexy and pretty much singular, with a terrific stage-presence, both in terms of sound and appearance. Certainly more than you could say about, oh, Elefant.

That said, i often feel like the only person i know who found Fever to Tell an immediate low-point. Especially after the promise of the first EP (and the live shows that supported it), Fever to Tell felt like a dashed-off f**k you from a band intent on torpedoing its impending success, with 11 songs of tuneless preening (the sort of thing the band had already mastered with the first EP's "Art Star") and the one pretty number that just made the remainder seem even more half-assed. Maybe it was, collectively, a refreshing show of rock-star style arrogance, maybe the band thought they needed to do something big and obvious to make an initial impact. Regardless, it connected.

It took three years for Show Your Bones to finally happen along, to me (and seemingly only to me) righted the ship a little bit with a much greater emphasis on melody and songcraft and less on attitude. Or, if nothing else, "Cheated Hearts" alone proved worth the price of admission. But fans of the first, for whom Fever was pretty much their only exposure to the band, were no doubt wondering where the screechy-silly-"sexy" novelty went, what with the keyboard and the acoustic guitars and such. Had YYY already gone mainstream?

Well, they were in the first place, but new EP, Is Is, finally effectively (re-)unites both dimensions of the band. Though consisting of songs written before Show Your Bones, it still sounds like a fairly natural progression for the group. Fans of the band's sassier side (and fans of huge Phil Collins-style snare sounds) will dig "Rockers to Swallow," while fans of the more anthemic material will get a major fix with the remaining tracks. And the whole thing over all sounds cool as hell. Not sure why these songs are just seeing the light of day now, rather than when they were written, but it's been proven time and again, you really can't fault anything this band does strategically.

Also, how cool are EPs? Why don't more bands make these?

Photo by Stig Nygaard via Flickr