Lets look at a potential Strokes Greatest Hits, one based purely on singles released in chronological order:
1. The Modern Age
2. Hard to Explain
3. New York City Cops
4. Last Night
5. Someday
6. 12:51
7. Reptilia
8. The End Has No End
9. Juicebox
10. Heart in a Cage
11. You Only Live Once
12. Undercover of Darkness
13. Taken For a Fool
14. Machu Picchu
15. All This Time
Considering that most critics only ever discuss their debut album, that’s a remarkably consistent and underrated ten year run. As patchy as a couple of their albums have undoubtedly been, top to bottom, their singles have never dipped in quality. Until ‘All This Time’. After some perky, nostalgic and practicly flourescent singles from 2011’s ‘Angles’ I was hoping for more of the same this time around. But ‘All This Time’ is the first Strokes single not to deliver on any count. It feels heavy; heavy with the weight of the chugging riff, heavy with the weight of expectation, heavy with burden of sounding like the strokes. But it doesn’t sound right. The vocal distortion is off, the guitars aren’t metallic enough, the chorus is too nagging, the solo is in the wrong place. If you’re trying to sound like The Strokes then these are the details that matter.
In fact, they spend the rest of the album (rightly or wrongly) trying to sound as little like The Strokes as possible, and it’s an identity crisis that makes my heart bleed. Here are the band responsible for the finest Rock n Roll of the decade, sounding somewhat bewildered; scratching their heads in a world that no longer answers to their beck and call. I’m not against bands exploring new avenues, but The Strokes are only exploring these avenues because they’re lost. On ‘Comedown Machine’ they simply don’t play to their many strengths, and that is the real shame.
Truth be told they get away with it, in as much as they’ve made a decent album. But ‘decent’ just won’t do when you’ve made the album of the decade – decent means they haven’t tried hard enough. I’d rather this be a noble disaster than ‘decent’. Still, it sounds good. It’s a nice, polished record. It proves yet again that Julian, Fab, Albert, Nikolai and Nick are the finest players in music and they clearly know each other inside out. It’s also their most consistent album since ‘Room on Fire’; unlike the more hit and miss ‘Angles’ and ‘First Impressions of Earth’, there are no stinkers here. But while they never dip as low as ‘Metabolism’ or ’15 Minutes’ they don’t come anywhere near to reaching the dizzy peaks found on previous album. The second half in particular flows very nicely but nothing really makes me want to reach for my converse and leather jacket and form a band.
Julian’s vocals just sound wrong. He’s got a deep, grimy, primal growl of a voice, which suits the music The Strokes have typically made. What it doesn’t suit is the taut, clean synth-pop that makes up a large proportion of the album. He sings in a high register on at least half these tracks, and it never works as well as you imagine he thinks it does. On the crystal clear ‘Changes’ it just sounds like a terrible fit – what that song really needs is the crystal clear tone of Brandon Flowers. Which is not to put Julian down – we all know he’s got the best voice in rock when he uses it correctly. However he stretches it in all the wrong directions here.
Still, the positives… ‘Tap Out’ is a tight but breezy pop-rock exercise that takes off where ‘Angles’ opener ‘Machu Picchu’ left off. It’s probably the best song on here because it doesn’t feel like a step out of their comfort zone and yet they are actually breaking some new ground. I haven’t heard them sounding this slick and well rehearsed before. For the same reasons ‘Happy Endings’ is another winnner, the closest they come to nailing the ‘classic Strokes sound’ whilst adding some new elements like vocoder background vocals. ‘Changes’ is another great song despite the vocal issues I mentioned earlier, and the only one that sounds like a Julian Casablancas solo number, an accusation thrown at the entire album by some patronising, tone-deaf critics. ‘Call It Karma, Call It Fate’ is a bizarrely beautiful way to end the album – it sounds like something off Little Joy’s debut album, but I genuinely have no idea what genre it belongs to – I just know it sounds like a strange relic from the gramophone age. ‘Close the door…not all the way’ he sings in the old-fashioned Casablancas way – and for a second I think he’s talking about the band. There are hints, even here, of what’s come before, but hints are all they are.
Ultimately it’s the songs that aim to sound like classic Strokes songs that leave me upset and confused. You see, I can understand why they can’t quite pull of sounding like Simple Minds on ‘One Way Trigger’ or Pet Shop Boys on ’80’s Comedown Machine’ but what hurts is that they don’t pull of sounding like The Strokes on ’50/50′ or ‘All This Time’. Have they really lost the ability to write generation defining anthems like this and this? And if the band of my generation have lost that ability…what does it say about me? It feels like a pretty damning nail in the coffin of my youth. It feels like a pretty terrifying symbol. The band who, for me, defined being young, defiant and alternative sound dated, anxious and out of touch. In the booklet to ‘Comedown Machine’, the same five faces that graced the booklet of ‘Is This It’ (and many teenage bedroom walls), are cast in the shadows, blood-red background, nothing left to say. What a comedown.
6.5/10