“Drifting, you don’t wanna know what’s going down.”
This line from “Tap Out,” the first song from The Strokes’ new album, Comedown Machine, encapsulates the effect fame and fortune has upon creativity. The Strokes’ first album, Is This It (2001) is widely hailed as one of the most mercurial debut albums of all time: the five New Yorkers unleashed staccato guitars, live drums recorded“Drifting, you don’t wanna know what’s going down.”
This line from “Tap Out,” the first song from The Strokes’ new album, Comedown Machine, encapsulates the effect fame and fortune has upon creativity. The Strokes’ first album, Is This It (2001) is widely hailed as one of the most mercurial debut albums of all time: the five New Yorkers unleashed staccato guitars, live drums recorded such that they sounded as though they’d been forced through innumerable drum machines, a healthy dollop of Velvet Underground mystique, and the reek of stale beer and forgettable sex upon a public long starved of unadulterated rock. The Strokes seemed hungry. Julian Casablancas sang through a fuzzbox, with a blocked nose that belied condensation on windowpanes, cold feet, the sogginess of cold pizza. Nikolai Fraiture on bass began each song’s bass line slowly, as though his fingers were still numb from the draught in his apartment. Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi passed riffs and rhythm lines between them like the final cigarette in the pack: careful not to take too much, but knowingly taking more than they felt they should. And Fabrizio Moretti pounded the bass drum as though hoping to shake the damp from his shoes. Is This It was recorded for almost nothing in a studio with almost nothing in it, with almost nothing on the walls except a tattered poster of a Victoria’s Secret model.
Twelve years later, and The Strokes have long lost their lean and hungry look. I wanted to love Comedown Machine–they’re one of my all-time favourite bands. Sadly, it sounds as though the band is just “drifting,” willingly ignorant of the downward trajectory their music has gradually begun to take. There is one brilliant song on Comedown Machine, there is a good song, and there are a few blandly all-right tracks.
This brilliant song is “Welcome To Japan.” On their last album, Angles (2011), The Strokes went in a more electronic direction. The guitars now competed with lush synths in the mix, shifting the music towards disco and away from the angular, brittle rock they’d created earlier in their career. “Welcome To Japan” strikes the perfect balance between the two. A four-to-the-floor disco beat anchors a hauntingly minor-key song– “didn’t know the gun was loaded,” Casablancas plaintively cries. The staccato guitars are back, but only for a little while: the notes gradually go from being distorted and rocky to becoming almost like the airy brushing of the keys on a keyboard. It merits repeated listening, and bears a slight similarity to the stunning “The Chauffeur” by Duran Duran.
The good song is “Slow Animals.” It has a hushed quality not unlike The Temper Trap’s “Sweet Disposition,” and is sung, like that song, in a gentle falsetto (something Casablancas uses with mixed results elsewhere on the album). The guitars echo; a synth runs up and down arpeggios with dizzying speed. The chorus, however, is jarring. The gentleness is abandoned for rousing, Coldplay-like ululations. Like so many other songs on the album, “Slow Animals” sees the band capture a mood but become too lazy to keep it alive for the song’s duration.
This wouldn’t be such a travesty if it weren’t for the fact that The Strokes were once masters of capturing a mood. In its finest moments, Is This It conveyed the ringing silence and bleary eyes of the morning after a big night as perfectly as The Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” did decades before. Songs on Comedown Machine like “Tap Out” and “All The Time” are evidence of abandoned moods. These songs have the classic elements of Strokes songs–guitar interplay, Casablancas’ hungover croon– but no soul. The chorus of “All The Time” consists exactly of the obliqueness The Strokes founded their image upon: ‘All the time that I need/ is never quite enough.’ The trouble is, it just feels pretentious here. These are the insipid noodlings of musicians who’ve made it so big that they don’t feel the burning desire to make it any more.
This is the album people make when they’ve become so comfortable lounging by the poolside in Beverley Hills sunshine that they don’t want to lock themselves in a damp recording studio, hungrily creating art while staring at the tattered poster of a Victoria’s Secret model on the wall. However, I feel that when the eulogies of The Strokes are written, Comedown Machine will be cited as the first sign of the ultimately terminal illness that is self-satisfaction.… Expand