After the hi-fi pop leanings of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ 2009 album It’s Blitz – a release marked by the fact that guitarist Nick Zinner barely picked up his chosen instrument – lead singer Karen O promised fans a scrappier, more rough-and-ready followup, similar in tone to their debut, Fever to Tell. “It’s extremely lo-fi,” Karen O told Pitchfork last month of the band’s latest effort, Mosquito. “We had a shitty drum machine, a shitty sampled keyboard, tons of delay on the vocals.” And so what makes Sacrilege, the album’s first single, such a curveball is that it opens in a fairly muted style, with Karen O’s multitracked vocals weaving eerily in and out of a fuzzy bassline and Zinner’s distant guitar scratches. Like Gold Lion, which quietly opened the campaign for second album Show Your Bones, it’s a slow-burn success that builds confidently, taking the listener along for the ride as opposed to giving away its treats immediately. Just as it seems to be settling into its own skin, however, a 24-piece gospel choir starts to bubble up from beneath the surface. Seemingly lifted from Madonna’s Like a Prayer and plonked into the song’s final minute, it’s a brilliantly unexpected addition, and as Karen O and the choir chant “sacrilege, sacrilege, sacrilege you say” during the song’s final 10 seconds, all that talk about lo-fi recordings using a tin can and a bit of string seems a bit nonsensical. [Source]