the strokes – Plain Or Pan

Odd band, The Strokes. They’ve got – or maybe nowadays since they’ve made some real money – they had something of a classic rock ‘n roll look; battered Levi’s and even more battered leather, tiny t-shirts and tight, tight pants, in their dirty Converse and winkle pickers and moneyed Manhattan sidewalk sneakers an array of de rigeur footgear, not to mention the sixteen different haircuts crowning each angular and chiselled face.

Line them up in a police identity parade though and, on closer inspection, they are indeed an odd bunch.

There’s a singer, all doe eyed boredom with the personality of dry toast who hangs from his mic stand when not having to sing. Which, given The Strokes are all about the guitars (sorry, were all about the guitars) is quite often. There’s a bass player who holds his instrument the way a big game poacher might tote his rifle if he’s on the lookout for a stray elephant. There’s a pair of guitar players, one low slung and coaxing lightning bolts of electric thrills from his six strings, the other playing his white Strat at chest-height, like Dylan in the ’60s, you might note, with the hair to match, but frantically rattling out rapid fire open chords high up the neck, his face a twisted gurn of concentration, his corkscrew curls bouncing in time to the four to the floor beat. Join the two players together and you’ve have pretty much the complete guitarist. The guitar would be at the right height for a start. And, yes, that beat. At the back, the quiet Stroke, the coolest Stroke, a Stroke so handsome he got to step out with Drew Barrymore for years, The Strokes have the greatest New York City drummer since Clem Burke.

And their individual names. Exotic. Storied. A mini cosmosis of the East Village’s multi-cultured diversity. Julian Casablancas. Albert Hammond Jr. Nick Valensi. Nikolai Fraiture. Greek. Italian. Greek-Italian. And, in Fab Moretti, a drummer who sounds like an advertising statement, a nothing more and nothing less, good, honest testament to Italian beer itself.

Is This It? turned 25 yesterday. Or, at least, BBC Radio 6 Music, by pumping out a Strokes-themed playlist across the entire schedule could tell me so. Strokes-themed. That phrase was doing quite a bit of heavy lifting, I tell you. I’ve always had it as a defining memory that I bought Is This It? on its day of release on the Monday of 27th August, 2001. Same day I bought the Zim’s Love And Theft, if I’m not mistaken. Which, Mr BBC, I’m not. I know this because our daughter was born the day before. And I know my dates. The Strokes album and the Bob album are both cultural milestones, maybe, but the birth of your children remains the highest of life’s high points. 29th July, 6 Music? I think you’re about a month too early.

I happened to catch a terrifically insightful interview with the album’s producer Gordon Raphael while out and about in the car late in the afternoon. He emphasised just how much work it took The Strokes to appear nonchalant and cool and raggedly spontaneous. Yeah, they had the look, but the real hours were put in in the rehearsal room. It takes a lot of hard work to look like you’re not working hard. 18 hour days were not uncommon in their search for the rickety rock ‘n roll sound that would come to define them. They played over and over and over, tweaking a riff here, dropping unnecessary flab there. Casablancas at this point wasn’t really their singer. A pal, he hung around in the rehearsal room’s corner until one day he went full-on Noel and pointed out what they needed to do to make the songs better. From then on in he was the band’s vocalist and musical director. Hanging freely from microphone stands during guitar breaks is, apparently, when his best ideas appear.

Listening to The Strokes then and now, it’s clear where the influences lie. A bit Velvet-y here, a bit Iggy there, a whole lotta Television interplay everywhere else. It was interesting then to hear Raphael say how the band brought three records to him in their pursuit of their sound. You could probably name them…except you’d probably be wrong.

The drum sound. It had to have the crisp compression of John Lennon’s Watching The Wheels.

The guitar rhythm. It had to have the unique and clean separateness of The Wailers on Bob Marley’s Uprising album.

The overall feel. It had to have the messy chaos of Guided By Voices’ Game Of Pricks.

That was it.

If you listen to Is This It? you’ll hear all of this. Not hard to explain at all.

The Strokes – Hard To Explain

(Subtitled What Is This Shit?)

It was those opening words of his review that got Greil Marcus fired from Rolling Stone magazine in 1970 following his slaying of Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait. A hotchpotch of bewildering cover versions, syrupy reworkings of his own back catalogue and bizarre odds ‘n sodds so far removed from the Bob of 2/3/4 years earlier as to place the 1970s Bob firmly in the ‘has-been’ category, we can, with the benefit of hindsight apprecaite Marcus’ review for what it really was – a passionate attack on an act once so revered and vital but now finding themselves in the midst of creative meltdown. If you’ve ever experienced the disappointment of your favourite band so spectacularly failing to deliver, you should take the time to read it.

And so to The Strokes. Is This It came out 11 and a half years ago (the day of the 9/11 bombings, same day as the Zim’s Love And Theft, if I remember correctly) and was a perfect summation of everything The Strokes had worked to by that point. NYC rich kids, a contradiction of expensive continental schooling and extensive dress-down grooming, they took the blueprint of all that was great with mid 70s Noo Yoik noo wave and ran with it in a scramble of battered Converse and 28″ waists. A garage band, a proper we-can-play-our-chops garage band, they burned their way through a handful of lean, mean, rattlin’ and rollin’ tracks, every one more vital than the previous one. Their look, their sound was nothing new. It was nothing clever. But it was terrific. Last Nite was my favourite.

Last Nite (from debut The Modern Age ep):

Last Nite came complete with the sound a million bands who’ve ever played live in front of a ghetto blaster set to ‘record’ will recognise – that of the sound of the snare drum rattling from the vibrations from the ambience in the room. It takes me right back to ear-splitting band rehearsals at Shabby Road even as I type. With doe-eyed Julian and his Benylin-through-a-bullhorn vocal and fab drummer Fab Moretti about to embark on a relationship with A-lister Drew Barrymore, they fairly set the loins alight of many an impressionable female. They had the licks. They had the looks. They had it all and the world was their oyster.

Fast forward to 2013. The Strokes’ 5th album, Comedown Machine, has just been released. I’ve lived with it since the end of March and, well, Letdown Machine would perhaps have been a more appropriate title. It’s not exactly a surprise – the last couple of albums have been nothing but weak filler propped up by the occasional FM-shiny belter, but Comedown Machine has no redeemable features. None at all. Leaving behind the myriad of 70s influences that made The Strokes what they are, they seem to have discovered the 80s. And not an 80s where demi Gods such as John McGeoch and Julian Cope and Ian Curtis and (insert your own idol here) provided a real alternative to the rubbish filling the airwaves, but an 80s of Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine and Linn drums and Rubik’s Cubes and shitty day-glo socks. It wasn’t very good then and it isn’t very good now. In short, it’s a horrible car crash of electro bleeps and synthesized drums (synthesized drums! Poor Fab – whatever happened to the Clem Burkeisms he was so good at?)

Looking at this, whatever you’re thinking, I’m thinking it too.

Before any singing starts, the opening track sounds like a demo of Beyonce’s Bootylicious, all pitter pattering drum machines, jerky Super Mario melodies and FX heavy guitars. On paper, that might sound interesting. Good, even. It’s not. Lead single One Way Trigger shamelessly appropriates the hook from A-Ha’s Take On Me and petres out in a cascade of falsetto singing and electro handclaps. Gads. Throughout, you’ll hear the sound of a band as bloated and insignificant as Duran Duran, playing Strokes by numbers with diminishing returns. I’ve tried hard to like it, I really have. But, nah, The Strokes have lost it. The most interesting track 50/50, with its backwards effects and repetitive computerised guitar parts sounds an awful lot like Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s Music For A Found Harmonium. Penguin! Cafe! Orchestra! Now there’s something you never thought you’d read. What is this shit indeed.

Contrast & Compare:

Music For A Found Harmonium: