See Yeah Yeah Yeahs Celebrate ‘Fever to Tell’ With First Show in Four Years
Yeah Yeah Yeahs revisited the majority of their Fever to Tell album during a show at the Fonda Theater in Los Angeles on Wednesday night. The performance, which aligned with the recent release of an expanded Fever to Tell reissue, marked the band’s first concert in four years.
This was not a faithful, front-to-back regurgitation of a treasured musical document: Yeah Yeah Yeahs performed Fever to Tell tracks in their own order – they started with the original LP’s closer, “Modern Romance,” and chose to leave out “Man” and “No No No” – and added a smattering of more recent songs to their set-list, including “Gold Lion” and “Heads Will Roll.”
During Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ encore, the band played Fever to Tell‘s hidden track, “Poor Song,” before up-shifting with “Y Control,” which gave lead singer Karen O a chance to howl and bound up and down. They closed the evening with a blistering version of “Tick,” originally the fourth song on Fever to Tell.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs reissued Fever to Tell last Friday with nine previously unreleased demos and eight B-sides and rarities. “A friend of a friend kept asking if we were ever gonna put Fever To Tell out on vinyl as it hasn’t been on vinyl in 10 years,” the band noted in a statement. “That’s not right. So here it is … plus a time capsule of photos, demos (1st ever recorded), a mini film documenting our near downfall and other fun memorabilia, from the turn of the century NYC, made with love + the usual blood, sweat + tears of Yeah Yeah Yeahs.”
The Fonda Theater show represented the band’s first performance as a unit since 2013. (They got together for a one-off set of classic rock covers last year.) They will perform again in Los Angeles on Saturday, then head north to play at the Fox Theater in Oakland on Monday. They have one additional show scheduled for the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn on November 7th.