A cursory look at the Billboard charts leads one to conclude that not too much has changed on the pop landscape since 2001. Hip-hop is still the dominant cultural force, teen pop seems to have taken a vacation, and illegal file sharing continues to eat away at record-biz revenues big time.
And the Strokes still ain’t all that popular.
Some of us weren’t that surprised when, at the time of their debut album’s release in October 2001, the Strokes failed to become rock music’s Next Big Thing. Rock in general had been on the outs for years, and unlike Brits, whose delight in the pose has been their constituency’s distinguishing feature since the Rolling Stones, Americans don’t cotton so easily to these New York boys’ affected aloofness. Furthermore, many stateside observers, myself included, were initially skeptical following all the hype that the Strokes rode in the British press and the subsequent push by their record company to posit them as the saints who would save rock’n’roll. Whoopee.
The Strokes couldn’t and didn’t save rock’n’roll, of course, but “Is This It” -which like all the records of the much-touted “garage rock” revival except the White Stripes’ “Elephant” has failed to break platinum – remains a really, really good record. Which isn’t the same thing as a great record, but I digress.
So the question remains: will “Room on Fire” catch fire? The answer, as far as I can gauge it, is a resounding “no.” Songs meander, the hooks don’t forge ahead with the kind of frequency that they did on “Is This It” and overall the record lacks the sparks that made their debut such a gas. None of this is to suggest that “Room on Fire” is a bad record. Yet, one can’t help but be a bit disappointed after the headlong rush that was the Strokes’ debut album.
The album kicks off with the midtempo “What Ever Happened?”, which spits out finger snaps and Morse-code riffing before launching into a riff reminiscent of…Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Learning to Fly”? Perhaps this critic is cursed with too-sharp ears, but after copping licks from Motown and Iggy Pop the new source material seems like a bit of a downgrade. The second track, “Reptilia,” continues the trend by riffing on “Soma,” the third song from the band’s first album. The Strokes possess a complex melodicism that is arguably unrivaled by any other band currently working, but do they really need to be repeating themselves already?
If some fans are dismayed by the lack of new ideas on “Room on Fire,” let it be noted that all the elements which leapt out on the band’s debut are in full effect here: the choppy, Velvets-like rhythms and the static backbeat of drummer Fabrizio Morretti; the intertwining, sinewy guitar lines; and, perhaps most crucially, the narcotic, jet-lagged drawl of singer Julian Casablancas. Guitarist Nick Valensi shakes up the proceedings a bit with a newfound propensity for eerily synth-like leads, but otherwise the band stays firmly in place.
A few songs on “Room on Fire” leap out of the melisma. “Automatic Stop” dazzles with dub-like guitar inflections and Casablancas’ characteristic swoons, “Between Love and Hate” kicks with a disco beat as the singer coldly forswears “I never needed anybody,” and “The End Has No End” feels like 1983 all over again. Casablancas largely sticks to his pervasive theme of romantic pessimism, though, and “Room On Fire” essentially comes off as a holding pattern for the Strokes. Whether their next record will deliver on the promise of the band’s initial hype remains to be seen.
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