The Strokes
Angles
(RCA / Rough Trade)
“The Strokes are going to save rock music!” they claimed in 2001. But in many ways this New York group have only served to deteriorate it - Is This It, their 2001 debut, set in motion a cycle of revivalism and hero worship that adopted the confidence and sense of occasion usually reserved for real envelope pushers, or the type of generation delegates that diagnose a mood and prescribe their own vital sonic elixir. The problem with the Strokes though, is that they sounded and looked like a band from the 1970s. Is this really it? Is rock music really going to be this self-reflexive from now on? After ten years of revivals crossing the whole gamut of rock’s short history, the answer, in terms of big splashes in commercial rock music, is a resounding and deflated yes.
It’s a surprise that anyone still has it in them to anticipate Angles, the group’s first record since 2006’s ambivalently received First Impressions of Earth. But anticipate it they do; the reason, you may suppose, is that The Strokes are genius songwriters. Actually, they’re not. Not on the evidence of Angles, where the sounds beneath verses, the lustrously sharp textures and those formidably ubiquitous guitar tones – trebly, perforated, abrupt - are all there really is. The Strokes are merely serviceable, a kind of Readers Digest rock, and Angles is an omnibus of tropes and flourishes loaded with stale connotations and glazed with a golden years frame rate. The Strokes are an impeccably calibrated machine vendoring impressions of the past, but even in this capacity they're as satisfying as a watery aperitif. You can probably blame the geriatric UK press for brainwashing us into thinking this was ever a good idea.
But it's true that The Strokes are capable of making big impressions, and their songs always sound promising: there's a stunning immediacy to their productions. But the effort this group put into gorgeous verse instrumentation seems to preclude their expending any effort on choruses, which are bobby-pinned on as if in a rush to fill three minutes. There's a predictable '80s FM radio rock theme to Angles, ('tis where the zeitgeist lays today) such as during 'Two Kinds of Happiness' - its evocative retro-synthetic moodiness gutted by one of those tiringly “climactic” choruses where a mechanically upward-adjusted tempo is accompanied by Julian Casablancas' blandly soaring vocals, nasalising here and there indeterminately. Casablancas sounds alarmingly like Matt Bellamy during 'Metabolism', a lifeless exhibition of fire-and-brimstone virtuosity that subscribes to the Muse rule of “if there's no song to be found, break glass with sledgehammer for bigger sledgehammer”.
Not only do The Strokes not have any of their own ideas remaining, the few they appropriate are executed poorly on this record. Many of their contemporaneous also-rans could heave up better records than this after fasting. The White Stripes and Kings of Leon – both similarly tributary, albeit in different styles – have managed to consistently release good records because they have the prerequisite ability to bolt together a song. And let's face it: the impulse for modern rock music to emulate past glories wholesale hasn't abated. But if the genre is to rest soundly on its laurels it should communicate something to us - at very least excitement, or urgency.
Angles is likely to disappoint anyone enamoured by Is This It, because in 2011 The Strokes are devoid of vitality and spontaneity, sounding like a gaunt cash cow being slaughtered for its pulp and gristle. Angles is the resulting chewy sausage.
Shaun Prescott
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The Strokes - 'Under Cover of Darkness'