# 7 The Strokes Is This It

I have memories of The Strokes that are important to mention before I even think of starting listening through to that truly great debut album again. First thing was that photo, posted entirely by chance in the NME. Once it was printed the resonance of it gathered pace until it fleckered out and infected the whole gene pool and changed everything. That was the last time that publication ever did or ever will mean anything to me. But it was a pretty fond farewell.

 

That photo, along with the Modern Age EP was such a revelation and a game changer that it's hugely difficult to look back and describe how and why it did exactly what it did. But I'm not alone. I remember listening to the first twenty seconds of The Modern Age and it was Pere Ubu and then it was The Velvet Underground and then it was Television and then it was the whole disorientating, intoxicating CBGB's scene being shaken up and distilled inside my small portion of humanity forever.

 

I hadn't dreamed a new young band would ever make me feel that way again. I can only imagine what it must have been like if only I'd been young enough to hear it and to have ears to hear how good it was without all that knowledge of where it actually came from.

 

This album has achieved and has maintained an incredibly high status since it was released in 2001.  It's ranked at #27 on the all time album list on here between Exile on Main Street and The Doors. This is considerably higher than any of the CBGB's bands, Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Blondie or Television manage which I'd have to question myself even as a fan. It's constantly touted as an album that changed people's lives or made them decide to form bands.

 

 

The Strokes have also been the focus for the most incredible backlash as being indicative of everything that's wrong with modern alternative music. It's 'trust fund indie ' derivative, contrived and lazy, content to ride the wave of a pick and mix selection of the original CBGB's Bowery bands sounds and cash in in a way many of them were never able to.

 

The release of this album made me want to and look very seriously into the possibility of moving to New York City in 2001 so it's probably fairly evident which camp I'm likely to be in. If you're round about my age or older and are interested in this stuff your stance on The Strokes probably depends on just how much that first wave of bands meant to you.

 

 

To me they meant more than I'll ever be able to say, so The Strokes were just the band I'd been waiting to hear for most of my adult life as I was just too young and unaware to appreciate the original set of groups when they were happening. If you were the same age or younger as The Strokes when they first emerged, why would you care anyway? They were more than enough in themselves.

 

 

Dare I say it the album cover is not very good. It became the source of some humour particularly in conversations between myself, my sister and her husband round about that time. He at this point designed and produced record labels for the Rough Trade record label for whom the band had signed.. I don't think he had much input on this particular one but was given it as an image the group wanted. I think some kind of spoof on Spinal Tap was intended. Still, it's rather a nice bottom!

 

I have seen this used as an alternative cover.

 

 

This really says absolutely nothing about anything at although it might be a decent design for sofa material. Over the years record design proved not to be the The Strokes strong suit. Musicians should really realise that this kind of stuff is incredibly important. The groups that understood this like The Smiths, Belle & Sebastian, The White Stripes, New Order and Echo & the Bunnymen amongst precious few others really did their fans an enormous favour.

 

The photo of the band on the back cover really said a lot more about what we could expect to hear inside. It's classic New York. The band could walk straight behind Debbie Harry and supplant the rest of Blondie and it seems doubtful that many people would even notice.

 

 

They're all dressed down in jeans, jackets and sneakers looking at their shoes their shadows stretching out ahead of them apart from Casablancas who is crouched at the back appearing to take aim at the camera. It's an understated and effective image.

 

I love the way the album starts. It sounds like some kind of electronic toy, whirling round, winding down and coming to a stop. Then Is This It starts up. It's just Casablancas, a simple guitar and a basic metronomic backbeat. It speeds up to a point of lazy intensity that he comes to make his calling card during the course of the album.

 

 

 

The subject matter seems to be about relationship issues and the inability to relate effectively with others. It would seem appropriate because throughout Casablancas doesn't really communicate in coherent, effective bursts of expression at many points on the album. It's almost all offhand throwaway comments, in-jokes, observations and outbursts expressing his emotions as they come upon him from one moment to the next. It's a form of expression that's incredible appropriate for what the band are wanting to achieve.

 

Most of his lyrics seem to emerge from on-going conversations, in the bars, apartments, and on the streets and back-alleys of New York. It's hip-speak in the grand New York City tradition that can be traced all the way back to the Beats and beyond.

 

 

 Casablancas speaks it fluently and the band understand the city's great legacy more than sufficiently to back him up with arrangements that are definitively New York throughout. They're very much a gang in the noble tradition of the Velvets, The New York Dolls and The Ramones.  

 

I haven't mentioned the rest of the band individually yet but they have a great set of names: Julian Casablancas, Nick Valensi, Albert Hammond, Nikolai Fraiture and Fabrizio Moretti. All the best bands have good sets of individual names. The Beatles, The Smiths, Blondie, R.E.M, The Velvets, The Go-Betweens and Joy Division band members all have good names and the Strokes names are up there with any of them collectively and individually. They have a ring of New Manhattan hip society about them. Scott Fitzgerald might have had a hand somewhere in their casting.

 

 

 Casablancas' lyrics, voice and delivery are a major part of The Strokes appeal to me. His is unmistakeably a New York drawl. It's so effortlessly mannered and wry and for me embodies why this city is the most exciting one on earth. I've spent a month of my life there and it struck me as a place where you could really live to the most heightened, intense state imaginable. So long as you had the money behind you and the understanding for the way it worked which The Strokes evidently did.

 

The first minute and fifty seconds of The Modern Age are in themselves still enough to justify every misstep the band might have made since. The three minutes thirty three that it lasts totally validates their entire existence. It's one of the very best New York records ever made. Every time I hear it I'm taken back to the first time I ever heard it. There are very, very few records I can say this of. It's so melodically engaged, uptight and urgent and has such a deep innate understanding of everything that made that New York Punk scene so astonishing and life changing that I remember hearing it for the first time was virtually an epiphany. I'd forgotten that people could sing and play this way.

 

                                                'Up on a hill, that's where we begin...

                                                 This little story of, long time again.'

 

                                          'In the sun, sun, having fun, it's in my blood'

 

                                                      'I took too many, varieties'

 

                                          'Rolling in the ocean. Trying to catch her eye.'

 

Do yourself a favour. Listen to it!

 

Soma keeps up the momentum. It's one of the few songs on the album where it's relatively clear what the lyric is about. No real surprises, the plant, drink and ritual of Soma.

 

 'Soma is what they would take when
Hard times opened their eyes
Saw pain in a new way
High stakes for a few names
Racing against sun beams
Losing against their dreams
In your eyes'

The song itself underlines what the band are capable of. There so much tension, space and intensity here and it seem to spark from the close knit relationships of the group themselves. They seem to be able to slow down, speed up or bring things to a climax at will. In all the years since their debut they've never changed or lost a member. I don't think this is accidental. They sustain each other.

Unusually this particular song is difficult to tie down to a particular influence or influences. Elsewhere riffs or melodic shifts shout out Ramones, Blondie or Television though with this band these moments of recognition are things of joy rather than disappointment as they might be with other bands because there's such an ingrained understanding of what they're doing. With Soma they manage to craft something that is all entirely their own.

 

In contrast with this it's perfectly clear where next track Barely Legal draws its inspiration from. It's all new wave, choppy bouncy chords, half Rockaway Beach half Union City Blue. It's probably the most throwaway song on the album, there's a sense of a Strokes formula going on  here but it's no less catchy or likeable for all that. Like everything else on here it certainly doesn't outstay its welcome. Every track leaves you wanting more which is a great lesson to understand as well as The Strokes clearly do.

 

Last song on the first side Someday is  great pop single that never was. Pretty much every track here would have graced the charts. David Bowie's Modern Love plays some role in the lead-in. 'There are many ways to miss the good old days.' Here Casablancas seems keen  to convince some unfortunate girl that she really doesn't wish to go out with him anymore. Once again he seems intent to convert his essential laziness and indolence into virtues. It comes up in the lyrics again and again. 'I'm just way too tired', 'I never show up on Wednesdays. That's something that I learned yesterday', and here 'I'm working so I don't have to try so hard'. Workshy scamps! 

 

 

Side 2 is just a waking dream from beginning to end. It's flawless. Six songs to the first side's five. I wish bands would make an effort to ensure their records are symmetrical but still. The sound and feel and sentiments of the lyrics are broadly similar to those that have come before. 

 

The band quite consciously wanted the album to be stripped down and unpretentious, playing together in the studio on click tracks rather than recording their parts separately and often settling on first takes. The album was completed in six weeks. The way bands had worked twenty years previously but certainly not the norm when The Strokes produced this.

 

This must have gone quite against the grain of the way music was made at this point in time and doubtless the band would have been on the receiving end of a certain amount of record company and management pressure as a direct consequence. They deserve great credit for not buckling to it and sticking to their guns. It's gloriously exciting and spontaneous as a result. Time and again mid-track the band collectively flick a switch and the songs just explode into action.

 

Whether it's Casablancas turning up the intensity or Valensi and Hammond Jr. igniting, the effect when this occurs is just thrilling. Fraiture and Morretti are a tightly locked, and dynamic rhythm section Moretti very much in the Clem Burke mode and Fraiture a really melodic bass player whose lines allow songs like Hard to Explain to open up and breathe in a way they never could otherwise.

 

They're a very strong unit and they work as one throughout. Valensi is the only player here with virtuoso qualities but he keeps them on a leash mindful of the fact that this is essentially New Wave territory and you get fifteen seconds of solo at most a song if you're sensible. 

 

 

 

Alone, Together sets off with a rock hard drum beat and slashing, pulsing riffs. Casablanca's vocals are so disciplined that he almost sounds like another instrument here. The Strokes denied there was a Television influence but it's hard not to hear it here the way the twin guitars interlock, mesh and interweav and respond to one another. The way Hammond plays foil, Richard Lloyd to Valensi's Verlaine. Casablanca meanwhile comes on like Iggy Pop's housetrained little brother.

 

The lyrical concerns are again emotional personal dysfunctionalism but of the kind though you don't realise it at the time but are probably a passing phase even when you experience them with obsessional intensity in your late teens and early twenties.

 

I'm not meaning to patronise Casablancas. One thing I most love about The Strokes is his detached emotional intensity. But he's never Dee Dee Ramone turning tricks on 53rd & 3rd, Richard Hell nodding off in his bath or Iggy Pop lurking in an alley as the neighbourhood threat. He's not Lou waiting for the man.

 

The Strokes live a much more charmed and comfortable existence. Manhattan is a nicer place now and has been for a while. The worst thing Casablancas seems in danger of here is a minor drinking problem. The emotional melodrama seems at times rather mannered as if he's using surface trauma as a front for romantic opportunism. 'Life seems unreal can we go back to your place?'

 

 

With Last Nite The Strokes hit the mother lode commercially and artistically. It's just a beautiful three minutes of five musicians locking together to produce a genius pop single, celebrating the joys of being young and free in the most exciting urban metropolis on the planet.

 

 On the surface the lyrics may portray more relationship trauma, frankly if you read the lyric sheet it's detailing the most ludicrous hissy fit imaginable but Casablancas anyway is not really a man with an axe to grind, he's a pretty happy one and this is all about the sound of a band howling out the indescribable and indefinable joys of youth. There were probably a few years when any indie DJ would keep this up his sleeve until midway through the night to the point when he wanted the dancefloor full. It surely would be within ten seconds of this coming on.

 

 

 

If these aren't Fender Stratocasters they're playing then they should be. This is almost luddite in its respect for the past but it treasures it, re-energises it, and gives it a passionate and deeply committed kiss of life making it every bit as vital and valid now as it was then.

 

I'm aware that this record is more than ten years old so it seems strange to refer to it in the present tense but we're on a strange time continuum as far as rock and pop culture is concerned now. Nothing of this sort, (guitar based alternative music) has sounded as fresh and vital to me since. I guess that's my loss and I'm just an old fogey but that's really the state of my ears at this point in time.  In any case this is all tribute to what a grand, concise melodic statement this album is. I've always defended The Strokes to the hilt because I felt they could have held their own with any of those legendary CBGB's bands on a hot summer double bill in 1976. With this set of songs they surely could have.

 

Next track Hard to Explain, also a single, is astonishingly either as good or even better. Metronomic drumtrack again, rattling guitars, bass providing the melodic counterpoint, sweet deadpan vocals and a chorus that Casablanca just rips into. No excess flesh. Beautiful, pure pop noise. I hear something of New Order at their leanest here. Certainly I imagine Hookey would doff his cap to the bassline.

 

 

New York City Cops...they ain't too smart. There I've said it. Ten years ago in the wake of 9/11, for a while this comment, hardly criminal in the context it was released, was censored and the track, probably the funniest and silliest the band ever released and one of their very best was, in the name of Freedom and the Great American Way, taken off the album in The States and replaced by When it Started .

 

I have to say this is a big infringement of some basic human rights on many levels, (not least because When I Started is not nearly as good), and that doesn't mean for a moment that I'm a condoner of terrorist acts. Quite the opposite. There's a lot of gross stupidity and rank hypocrisy committed by governments and corporations in the name of freedom, never mind the deep seated evil of much of what they do which I certainly don't wish to go into here. What the term freedom actually means in any real sense is anyone's guess at this point in time. I really don't know. But now for what it's worth I'm now going to make my own feeble attempt to enact my own freedom by posting a link to this this for all eternity. It's great... 

 

 

Trying Your Luck was the track that immediately caught my eye all those days, weeks, months and years ago and it still does all these years later. For me, it's not unlike the moment when you catch the eye of the love of your life and you both know what's happened through a crowd of complete strangers across the barroom floor. And that's actually happened to me! Trying Your Luck will always get me back there.

 

It's the most truly realised intense, romantic song on the album for me. Nick Valensi comes into his own as does the drumming midway through when Moretti brings the track to a direct halt then starts it up again. This is incredibly assured, mature playing. A sustained riff and interplay with Hammond. Jr.s supporting guitar drives the song straight through.

 

 

 

 

Take it or Leave It has fairly much always been its title for me. It does its thing and is a decent set closer. It doesn't have a particular emotional tug personally but feels like a meaningless home run, ten rows back in the stands that will be forgotten tomorrow because the game has already been long decided. The Strokes have already pegged the series and the pennant is winging its way back to New York after twenty five years away.

 

. It's one of those albums you don't feel like dwelling on when it's done because the sound of it and what it captures about life will always be quite enough in itself. The Strokes may never really have realised this again. Some might argue otherwise. I'm a great fan of their second album and need to listen to it again to make a fresh judgement. Such arguments are in the long term utterly redundant because The Strokes did it as definitively as they needed to first time round and deserve our permanent , enduring gratitude for doing so. Time to go back to New York. Soon as wings will bear me there!