LISTEN FOR THE YOWL that splinters like a live wire and you’ll hear Karen O attempting an exorcism. Her shows with her band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, in the early 2000s were crotch-grabbing, microphone-fellating, olive-oil-drizzling art-punk chaos, performed in outfits by the artist Christian Joy that looked like the next morning’s hangover. If you felt she was working something out, she was. “I was going through some shit,” she says. “Times, like, a hundred.” ¶ After a nine-year hiatus, Karen O and her bandmates, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase, return with Cool It Down, spurred by another sense of crisis. Their first LP, Fever to Tell from 2003, channeled the wreckage of post-9/11 New York; their latest contains the threat of environmental apocalypse. When Karen O began playing with the…
