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Show Your Bones is a revelation. Yeah Yeah Yeahs have returned with an album that will not be beat in 2006. Show Your Bones is timeless; there are no indications that Yeah Yeah Yeahs have been inspired by the past or present (this album's energy will not age with the reinventing wheel). The cause of Show Your Bones' perfection is that Yeah Yeah Yeahs have matured, and are not afraid to take the garage into the studio. That isn't to say this is a band now blushing with studio rouge, but rather, Yeah Yeah Yeahs are comfortable with their frightening rock alchemy in an environment with a fire extinguisher.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs' first album (Fever to Tell) felt rushed, uneven and reckless in impulsivity. These elements made the album an exciting debut; however, what lacked were solid efforts at songwriting. Fever to Tell had singles, but didn't feel like an album as a whole.

Show Your Bones has singles and feels like an album. In fact, this sophomore effort leaves the first album's fever behind and embraces maturity with a brand new disease. Karen O's singing has strengthened. Karen O still maintains her cat like howl, but with an added fierceness that elevates heartbreak lyrics into battle cries. Brian Chases' drumming remains the base. It is solid, varied, and uniquely his own. Nick Zinner's guitar playing is the largest improvement in Yeah Yeah Yeahs' sound. It is wild, inventive, and never falling into blues cliches or stock riffs.

The songs combine Fever's live feel with a new sense of bravado; we can almost see Karen O thrashing about while the chorus to "Gold Lion" kicks in. The songs are deeply layered, and on repeated listens, Nick Zinner's guitar noise becomes alive within the structure of the songs. Structurally, the songs mark a vast improvement over Fever's simplicity. Show Your Bones escapes the confinement of a verse/chorus/verse pattern, and allows its songs to be more experimental in their execution. The tracks on Show Your Bones are thematic; the music is in constant tension between avant-garde compulsion and infectious pop repulsion. The result is a type of rock caught in an aesthetic nightmare: pop hooks become jarring and jarring noise births pop hooks.

To describe the "sound" of Yeah Yeah Yeahs is difficult. It isn't "kinda like this band crossed with that band." Yeah Yeah Yeahs evoke a world of their own, and Show Your Bones brings us frighteningly close to this alternate musical reality where banshee howling, nightmarish surf guitar, and drum pyrotechnics make beautiful music.

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