Karen O Debuts Native Korean Rock Side Project in Brooklyn

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Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O has been easing up on the beer-spewing, stocking-ripping banshee-tornado whirlwind she's known for unleashing onstage — these days, she just wants to sing some old fashioned love songs. For the past few years, O has been recording lo-fi songs under the name Native Korean Rock, and last night she joined a few friends at Brooklyn's Union Pool for an evening of ballads fleshed out by little more than a few plucked strings, a guitar strum or two, and her own wrenching voice, delivered with a big, bright-lipsticked smile. (You can hear some of the music on Native Korean Rock's MySpace page.) Dressed in a sailor suit with dramatic silent-film-star makeup, O looked like the subject of a classic painting: she performed against a blue-sky backdrop, and her band donned navy-themed costumes, playing in a makeshift "boat" with a Korean-flag sail while sound clips of crashing waves and noisy seagulls played softly in the background. O dedicated the end of her first set to "summer love," before launching into "Indian Summer," an ode to a romance that goes on longer than planned. No such luck for the set itself: at a mere 30 minutes, it ended much too soon.

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Song Stories

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The Joy Formidable | 2011

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”

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