Comedown Machine

Rather than give us a full album of "The Strokes Misremember the '80s," the band falls back repeatedly on self-imitation.

The results aren’t all winners, but there are gems where you wouldn’t expect them.

Comedown Machine is an enjoyable album with some great moments, though not a perfect or definitive one.

Comedown Machine remains a pretty good album, possibly the least characteristic thing they've released to date.

Full of clever sounds, with melodies butting up against countermelodies and more laughs than you might think, Comedown Machine is by no means a bad record. It just has the misfortune of being the record that few Strokes fans want from them.

They're virtually unrecognisable as the band that made their game-changing debut, save perhaps for "All the Time."

Comedown Machine is basically a solo trip for singer Julian Casablancas, showing yet again how much he respects Eighties New Wave.

It is without a plan and without much of an aim, save for vague touchstones in ‘80s pop and new wave, a path tread much more smoothly by Casablancas’ prior solo work.

The Strokes’ hallmarks--those lean melodies, that steely interplay among guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. and bassist Nikolai Fraiture, the urgency of Julian Casablancas’s vocals--are largely absent on Comedown Machine, their fifth studio album. In their place is a looseness that’s refreshing enough, until you realize these guys are perhaps running short on ideas.

In one sense, it’s commendable that The Strokes are so willing to branch out and take on different styles, yet the effort often sounds overplayed or undercooked.

The production on most of Comedown Machine is off-putting in its chilliness.

Comedown Machine is a more even effort [than Angles], but it lacks any show-stopping moments, allowing the forgettable songs to blend together.

The band vacillates between rudderless tone poems ("'80s Comedown Machine"), exhausting rave-ups (the screeching "50/50"), and bizarre A-ha biting ("One Way Trigger"), all of which overflow with incomplete ideas.

For all the loving homages to past recording techniques, they sound laboured and bored. [May 2013, p.84]

It’s wilful experimentation with no pay-off, sounding lonely, old, with only the occasional, tempting flicker of a genius that once burnt bright.

Just like the band itself, it presents something of an ongoing identity crisis for the band, one that hasn’t figured out how to advance their sound except to put more meat on the bones.

The band can still come up with strong hooks, and some of the 80s guitar rock references hit their mark, but the results are sabotaged by singer Julian Casablancas, who sounds like he’s conserving all his energy and passion for his next solo record.

The Strokes have shamefully settled for average, and have failed even at that.

Nothing on Comedown Machine really sounds natural either; it comes across awkward, hollow, like dead-chemistry trying listlessly to spark.

While it introduces some interesting new ideas to The Strokes' repertoire, there are more clunkers here than anything resembling the dizzy highs of Is This It.