Batgirl Returns

Boo, Internet. You are a Karen O costume spoiler. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' KO turned up at Webster Hall last Tuesday night looking like a sex-dungeon Batgirl, resplendent in a shiny plastic onesie and bondage leggings, the first thought-bubble over your narrator's head was: Aw, she just wore that three days ago at Lollapalooza! Ack.

photo: Willie Davis/Veras

Like seeing Her Face on a grilled-cheese sandwich

Details

Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Webster Hall
August 7

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• Karen O
• Lollapalooza
• Spider-Man 3
• Music Festivals
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

What the Web didn't spoil, thank god.blogspot.com, is the exuberant magnificence of seeing her in person. This particular show was the first time the triple-Ys had played their hometown since releasing the five-song Is Is last month. Six years after the band's debut EP, Karen O remains a bad-ass rock creature revered for aerial spitting and microphone-fellating—perhaps the only woman in a decade of zeroes now able to rock a hat-scalped tinsel Cousin It wig and make a roomful of dedicated assholes swoon. And so, when she giddily grinned during the Spider-Man 3–soundtracked opener "Sealings," all us jaded jerks grinned along. When alarmingly long-haired drummer Brian Chase, Scissorhanded guitarist Nick Zinner, and second-string six-stringer Imaad Wasif all stepped back to let her morph the glib bridge of "Art Star" into a beastly death-metal ROOOOOOOOAAR, everybody understood why. And when Karen mule-kicked an invisible ass to the fugitive pogo-stomp of "Honeybear," we all secretly wished we owned that imaginary posterior.

Gotta come clean, though. I saw the YYYs at one of those two 100-person Glasslands Gallery shows where Is Is's night- vision videos were filmed, so my Webster experience was a little different than, say, the 1,399 of you collapsing into paroxysms of joy every time Karen O sucked her mic head. Glasslands was the live-show equivalent of having dinner with the Virgin Mary; Webster, for me, was more like seeing Her Face on a grilled-cheese sandwich. It was still awe-inspiring, humbling, and moving as all hell, but I'd already seen it on the Internet.