Beneath the sightless gaze of a giant eyeball, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen Orzolek (better known as Karen O) sheds her old skin as New York's pre-eminent art-punk princess and emerges as a Lee Bowery-style nightclub queen. With her indie pin-up features hidden behind a pink neon mask, and wearing a union-flag-inspired dress, orange corset and sky-blue tights, Orzolek jumps up and down like a bedroom superhero, the dense moshpit aping her every bounce.
The new, synth-led sound of Yeah Yeah Yeahs' latest album, It's Blitz, looks likely to propel them into the mainstream, but drummer Brian Chase and guitarist Nick Zinner are reminders of the band's original rock'n'roll spirit. Both clad in regulation black, Chase plays crisp, lean rhythms, while Zinner spins and staggers to the cool, razor-sharp chords that first marked out the three-piece from the glut of NYC bands to emerge from the shadow of the Strokes in 2003.
Tonight, there's no between-song banter; they let the music do the talking. Crisp rhythms and ominous keyboards link the hip-swinging blues of Black Tongue, the funk-rock of Phenomena, the grinding garage of Miles Away, and the ethereal Skeletons, during which a gentle rain of white paper flutters from the ceiling, making the trio look like figures in a snow globe.
With a stamp of her booted foot, Orzolek shoots glitter over the crowd, but her performance doesn't need such showbiz touches. As confrontational as Siouxsie Sioux and as sensual as Debbie Harry, Orzolek has a theatrical playfulness all her own. Covering her head with the hood of her dress and a long, diaphanous scarf, she writhes on the floor, dances with abandon and pulls what quickly becomes her party trick: lodging her microphone in her mouth and growling while bending backwards, hands at her sides.
It's when she is exposed emotionally that she is at her most powerful. She dedicates an encore of Maps to each of the band members' "loves" and to her parents, who are watching in the crowd. Her voice trembling, her body still, she wrings every ounce of feeling from the acoustic rendition, and after the last, poignant refrain of "They don't love you like I love you," she adds a heartfelt: "I do!"
But beneath the tender Orzolek is an unrepentant rebel. "I promised my parents I wasn't going to do this," she says of the sweary, raging, roaring Way Out. "But I break the rules all the time!" And she does it with enviable style.
