Contributed by Phil West

Watching the Yeah Yeah Yeahs live is basically an occasion to watch lead singer Karen O slip into mania. There are other things happening in a YYY show, of course – and on the supporting tour for their latest album Show Your Bones, there’s even more happening than usual, with guitarist Imaad Wassif helping guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase add the layers of texture which made Show Your Bones a lusher, more (dare we say it) mature effort than their previous efforts.

But for all their songwriting acumen and ability to balance punk angst with pop smarts, a Yeah Yeah Yeahs show is oftentimes a one-woman theater show with an unbeatable soundtrack.

As O displayed throughout Saturday’s sold-out show at Stubb’s, she doesn’t just sing – she embodies roles, sometimes going from coquettish and dolled-up to switchblade cool to straight-up deranged in the space of the same song. In a live setting, with gesture and costume and facial expressions all available to her, she registers somewhere between Nina Hagen and Lady Macbeth on the Spectacle Spectrum and can still come off as coy and in-on-the-joke in-between songs.

Starting with “Turn Into,” an unlikely opener (as it’s the closing song on the new album), the Yeah Yeah Yeahs delivered a 75-minute set touring through their relatively small yet significant discography.

Photos by Eric Uhlir on Flickr

Fans who have been with the band for the whole two-album, two-EP ride were treated to more obscure selections from the catalog, including an especially jittery version of “Pin,” a particularly propulsive “Miles Away,” and “Our Time,” a song so ridiculously catchy that our four year old has been singing it for the last year.

For the more casual YYY listener – and there seemed to be a fair amount sprinkled among the devotees, best exemplified by the UT fan in burnt orange cap, “O Who?” shirt, and orange-and-white beads – the group delivered what could be pegged in this post-Top 40-world as “hits,” including as-good-as-on-the-album versions of Show Your Bones’ most on-target songs, “Gold Lion” and “Cheated Hearts.” It wouldn’t be a YYY show without “Maps,” of course – on our short list for Song of Whatever We’re Going To Call This Decade – and on Saturday, their rendition was a slowed, hushed acoustic version that held its beauty and integrity even without the delicious tension between quiet and loud.

O stayed animated throughout, using a piece of her stage outfit alternately as a cowl, a shawl, and a noose-like object fraught with feminist semiotics (or at least that’s how it looked from where we were standing). When O asked the audience what they wanted to hear for what turned out to be the evening’s final song, the faithful fans up front responded with a fervor that caused O to comment on how clearly she understood what they wanted.

And what they wanted, of course, was “Art Star,” a punk litmus test from their first EP which flip-flops between sugary pop and a wall of ungodly noise, requiring O to use two microphones for her to project a gravelly, avant-garde scream over the wall of sound. It did its job, causing the most tentative there to flee while rewarding those with an encyclopedic knowledge of the band. It was one last reminder that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs aren’t only fun to listen to – they’re fun to watch.