Angles of our better nature
Many of my favorite bands put out records in 2010; it now looks like 2011 will have most of the remaining favorites, and a whole lot of the second-tier acts that I follow but don't think of as my desert-island choices. I'm a little more impressionable than I'd like to think with regards to new music, so sometimes I'll get disproportionately excited about a new album from reading interviews or profiles related to it, even if those articles might be broadly classified as "hype." Sometimes I catch myself buying albums more because I know of the band than because I actually really like the band. For example, I like the first Rural Alberta Advantage album pretty well, but it's not as if I've listened to it so heavily that I really need its follow-up to fill some kind of Rural Alberta Advantage (or Neutral Milk Hotel, for that matter) void in my life. Yet I did buy that second record. No harm done. I like buying music.
But I've remained wary of exactly one band this spring: the one that SPIN and Rolling Stone and everyone else seemed to be reporting on with the kind of breathless anticipation that would usually trick me into getting interested, at least for a few weeks: The Strokes. Remember the Strokes? Cool guys, leather jackets I think? Big when you were in college, probably? They're back! In album form!
I'm not trying to affect indifference. I bought Is This It in the fall of 2001 along with everyone else in my demographic and then, like a lot of people I know, I think, listened to it a lot before turning my attention to the White Stripes and White Blood Cells and liking that even more. Over the next ten years, the White Stripes proceeded to release albums both quickly and awesomely, and then, just a few weeks ago (at least officially), break up.
I know the Strokes have now released three albums in addition to Is This It -- actually the same number that the White Stripes have released since their 2001 album (although the White Stripes matched them despite essentially breaking up three years ago). But it's hard to avoid the feeling that the White Stripes had an entire career go by while the Strokes sort of dithered about what they should do next. It just didn't seem to come as easily for them: they followed up Is This It the same year that the White Stripes followed White Blood Cells, but the Strokes record, Room on Fire, received pretty typical sophomore album praise ("hooray, it's just like the last one!") (I even complained about this in one of my earliest livejournal posts!!), followed by pretty typical (and trickier to document, since it never turns up in the original reviews) sophomore album backbiting ("meh, it's just like the last one"). Then they released First Impressions of the Earth in 2006, and though I've only heard this record a few times and didn't care for what I heard, I do sympathize that it fell even harder to the record-review cycle curse: initially, I'm pretty sure everyone was like "yeah! The Strokes are back and they're changing it up like they failed to do on Room on Fire! Awesome!" and then a couple of years later, everyone admitted that it sucked and they wished they had just sequelized Is This It some more.
So imagine the weird undercurrent of animosity I must feel toward the Strokes to still look at them a little askance despite my utter sympathy about the way they've been alternately lionized and vilified by rock critics (that tendency in rock critics being a pet annoyance of mine, as anyone who still reads this LJ has probably figured out). It's not that I maintain any kind of seething hatred of the Strokes and everything they stand for. I was happy to let Marisa take care of the Strokes album-buying for the both of us, but it wasn't really out of disdain; I just never got a sense of urgency about those other albums. I was fine to hear them in her car once in awhile. When they appeared on SNL on March, I was interested in hearing their new stuff. Why not, right?
The thing is, as I was watching them on SNL, I had sort of revelation concurrent with "this song is pretty good." The song they played first, "Under Cover of Darkness," is indeed pretty good. Better, even: I like it a lot. It's a really solid Strokes song. But they looked so bored playing it! I know that's kind of their thing, but the same question kept coming back to me throughout the two performances: why is this what the Strokes want to be doing right now? If this is such a chore for all of them, why are they doing it at all?
Their SNL appearance alone would've been boring, but probably not actively annoying. I guess what bothered me about their indifferent looks was that I saw them after reading plenty of music-rag heads 'n decks about the apparently arduous process of getting the Strokes together to record a fourth album. Most of the band released solo or side-project albums over the past five or six years, and they took their time coming back together, seeming vaguely alienated from one another (and of course there were some drug problems involved, etc.). They recorded most of an album, scrapped it, recorded the songs again. Everyone pitched in on the songwriting instead of just Julian Casablancas. Apparently they pieced together Angles, the final product, from sessions with the rest of the band playing together and Julian essentially mailing in his vocals.
It's not a bad album, I don't think. I've listened to it five or six times now (thanks Marisa! Thanks $4 Amazon downloads!), and it doesn't bother me. It has some reasonably catchy songs. I haven't heard any lyrics that are as bad as the ones Marisa has pointed out from First Impressions of the Earth, although I couldn't really tell you what the words to any of the songs are, even the ones I like the best. In addition to "Under Cover of Darkness," there are some more straightforward Strokes-sounding songs that manage to sound not quite like carbon copies of their best past work: "Taken for a Fool," stupidly titled but swinging "Gratisfaction," the ballad-y "Call Me Back." I bet I'd be happy if someone threw this on at a party, the way Is This It still sounded fresh in the spring of 2002 when my Drawing I instructor put it on during our still-life studies. But what I'm not really hearing in this record is why the Strokes wanted to make it and what, if anything, they wanted to say.
Often it seems like side projects come from individual band members getting big heads about their role in the band's success, or getting sick of the band's success or sound or whatever. I get the sense that all these Strokes side projects came from everyone in the Strokes being totally bored with the Strokes. Fair enough. But I also get the sense that Angles was recorded out of obligation -- that everyone in the Strokes who is bored of being in the Strokes also feels that they probably should soldier on and continue being in the Strokes, for the sake of... well, that's where I wasn't so clear. Who do the Strokes think they're pleasing by staying together when it seems like they'd rather not, or are, at best, indifferent to doing so? I'm pretty sure they were never as big as the White Stripes as their peak, and they were never such a huge touring presence that they've cultivated these thousands upon thousands of clamoring fans. Obviously, there are Strokes fans out there, but anyway, do they seem like this crowdpleasing band anyway? Are they playing Madison Square Garden tonight because they feel like their fans really want to see them at MSG?
Over the past month or two, I think I've come across the answer: the Strokes stayed together for rock critics. There is something mainstream rock writers find absolutely irresistible about these guys; residual affection, perhaps, from when they attempted to save rock and roll ten years ago (a gesture that, in retrospect, was probably unnecessary, but also, still, appreciated given the Creed/Bizkit/Nickelback dynasty on modern rock radio at the time). So that's why the run-up to this totally decent and unspectacular (and, for the near decade of hemming and hawing, not so far removed from the pros and cons of Room on Fire) record was covered with such fervor: rock writers really, really wanted to write a Strokes cover story and were afraid they wouldn't get to!
I have to imagine, then, that there was a near-riot at the SPIN offices when their staff found out freelancer Sloane Crosley, she of those personal essays that may be amusing but often feel like much ado about near-nothing that any number of your friends could replicate and probably out-write without much trouble, would be doing the Strokes profile for their April issue. Maybe that's an unfair generalization, but SPIN seems to have a stake in the Strokes. Witness their April masthead, where nine staff names were appended with their selection for favorite Strokes song. I know Rob found my incredulity that NONE of them fucking mentioned "Last Nite" as that song kind of silly, but seriously: two of them chose songs from First Impressions and one of them chose a B-side that later became a song from First Impressions. And more to the point, is the Strokes really a deep-cut sort of band where it's interesting to hear what someone's favorite is? I guess maybe, if there's the novelty of it not being a song from Is This It, but really: the Strokes have about 50 songs. Total. After ten years. But here they are on the SPIN masthead like they've just released a retrospective box set rather than just scraped together a fourth record.
The Crosley piece isn't quite as convergently terrible as a SPIN profile of the Strokes written by Sloane Crosley threatens to be. In a way, having a less experienced music journalist write the piece feels like the magazine is admitting something, however tacitly: they need to hire a writer with some of her own personal style to actually make this band seem a little more interesting. Crosley does add some nice, more writerly touches to the profile, I must admit. But, as per usual from what else I've read of her, she puts herself into the piece by making observations that are sometimes amusing and mildly off-kilter, but just as often not especially important or interesting -- funny or faux-funny asides and wordplay she can add in to show that it's her interviewing this band (one at a time, naturally), not some anonymous writer. It's the simulation of a unique perspective.
When it comes time for her to discuss the band, it has the slight hint of someone who is just learning how to write about music. The Strokes seem to matter to her because, like you, she remembers them from college, or her friends: "If half the guys I know could bottle the band up and spray themselves with eau de Is This It, they would." I think this is supposed to speak to the cultural hold the Strokes maintain, but to me it speaks more to who Sloane Crosley hangs out with on weekends. One of the band members plays her Angles early, and after some cajoling she offers the appraisal that "most of the tracks... are so instantly catchy that the couple songs that don't measure up are like iodine in your throat." If you adjust this against the music-magazine hype and the accompanying attempt to overcorrect, what she is actually saying is more like: the album is pretty decent overall; it's got some duff tracks in addition to many clear highlights. Maybe that's presumptuous of me, to dismiss her feelings as a starrier-eyed, dressed-up version of my feelings. I'll put it another, less presumptuous but more directly disagreeable way: no, nothing on Angles is bracing enough to feel like iodine in your throat.
Finally, towards the end of the article, Crosley drops this observation:
"The Strokes are in a marriage. Who among us can pick out a movie with four other people, forget make four albums?"
Well, I don't know, I feel like I know a lot of people who could pick a movie with four other people. Obviously fewer of them could make four albums, sure. But a lot of bands do it. A lot bands get way past four albums. I'm not suggesting being in a band isn't a somewhat fragile, bizarre, perhaps unnatural state, but nor am I so sure we should be gazing in admiration at the Strokes for managing to stick with their major-label-supported, famous-before-they-had-an-album band.
Sometimes journalists writing about the Strokes remind me of girls in college going on about Guster: I can see how it would be mindblowing if you hadn't heard that many bands before.
I know I'm talking a lot about the band's image, press, and attitude, moreso than how their songs actually sound, so I'm as guilty as anyone of talking about the Strokes, not really talking about their music. But here's the thing about their music: it's pretty good. They have a sound, sometimes they play around with it, but they basically have this one thing halfway between the Velvet Underground and the Cars, and they do it pretty well. There are a lot of bands that do this. Not average the Cars and the VU, but stay true to a catchy but rather specialized sound. The Rural Alberta Advantage, as I mentioned a few thousand words ago. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart just put out an album that, while is noticeable the nineties-influenced version of their sound versus the previous record's eighties-influenced version of their sound, still, you know, pretty much what you'd expect the Pains of Being Pure at Heart to sound like if you've heard a song or two of theirs. For me, the Strokes is one of those specialty type bands. They're never going to be your favorite, but sometimes you want to hear something that sounds just like that.
So why do the White Stripes and the Hold Steady and Vampire Weekend and countless other indie-rock type bands who also have a fairly particular and consistent (if more expansive than, say, RAA or Pains) sound seem so much worthier of attention, to me, than the Strokes? I think the common denominator is the feeling that all of those guys really like (or with the White Stripes, liked) (or with Jack White in any other band, like!) being in a band and playing music for a living. The Strokes -- and I realize this is all just baseless analysis and who am I to assume things about their motivations, etc. -- seem to treat it more like a job, and not a musician job so much as a recreating the feeling people had with Is This It job. Their weariness is wearying -- though maybe not so much as the cheerleading that currently accompanies their every move.
But I've remained wary of exactly one band this spring: the one that SPIN and Rolling Stone and everyone else seemed to be reporting on with the kind of breathless anticipation that would usually trick me into getting interested, at least for a few weeks: The Strokes. Remember the Strokes? Cool guys, leather jackets I think? Big when you were in college, probably? They're back! In album form!
I'm not trying to affect indifference. I bought Is This It in the fall of 2001 along with everyone else in my demographic and then, like a lot of people I know, I think, listened to it a lot before turning my attention to the White Stripes and White Blood Cells and liking that even more. Over the next ten years, the White Stripes proceeded to release albums both quickly and awesomely, and then, just a few weeks ago (at least officially), break up.
I know the Strokes have now released three albums in addition to Is This It -- actually the same number that the White Stripes have released since their 2001 album (although the White Stripes matched them despite essentially breaking up three years ago). But it's hard to avoid the feeling that the White Stripes had an entire career go by while the Strokes sort of dithered about what they should do next. It just didn't seem to come as easily for them: they followed up Is This It the same year that the White Stripes followed White Blood Cells, but the Strokes record, Room on Fire, received pretty typical sophomore album praise ("hooray, it's just like the last one!") (I even complained about this in one of my earliest livejournal posts!!), followed by pretty typical (and trickier to document, since it never turns up in the original reviews) sophomore album backbiting ("meh, it's just like the last one"). Then they released First Impressions of the Earth in 2006, and though I've only heard this record a few times and didn't care for what I heard, I do sympathize that it fell even harder to the record-review cycle curse: initially, I'm pretty sure everyone was like "yeah! The Strokes are back and they're changing it up like they failed to do on Room on Fire! Awesome!" and then a couple of years later, everyone admitted that it sucked and they wished they had just sequelized Is This It some more.
So imagine the weird undercurrent of animosity I must feel toward the Strokes to still look at them a little askance despite my utter sympathy about the way they've been alternately lionized and vilified by rock critics (that tendency in rock critics being a pet annoyance of mine, as anyone who still reads this LJ has probably figured out). It's not that I maintain any kind of seething hatred of the Strokes and everything they stand for. I was happy to let Marisa take care of the Strokes album-buying for the both of us, but it wasn't really out of disdain; I just never got a sense of urgency about those other albums. I was fine to hear them in her car once in awhile. When they appeared on SNL on March, I was interested in hearing their new stuff. Why not, right?
The thing is, as I was watching them on SNL, I had sort of revelation concurrent with "this song is pretty good." The song they played first, "Under Cover of Darkness," is indeed pretty good. Better, even: I like it a lot. It's a really solid Strokes song. But they looked so bored playing it! I know that's kind of their thing, but the same question kept coming back to me throughout the two performances: why is this what the Strokes want to be doing right now? If this is such a chore for all of them, why are they doing it at all?
Their SNL appearance alone would've been boring, but probably not actively annoying. I guess what bothered me about their indifferent looks was that I saw them after reading plenty of music-rag heads 'n decks about the apparently arduous process of getting the Strokes together to record a fourth album. Most of the band released solo or side-project albums over the past five or six years, and they took their time coming back together, seeming vaguely alienated from one another (and of course there were some drug problems involved, etc.). They recorded most of an album, scrapped it, recorded the songs again. Everyone pitched in on the songwriting instead of just Julian Casablancas. Apparently they pieced together Angles, the final product, from sessions with the rest of the band playing together and Julian essentially mailing in his vocals.
It's not a bad album, I don't think. I've listened to it five or six times now (thanks Marisa! Thanks $4 Amazon downloads!), and it doesn't bother me. It has some reasonably catchy songs. I haven't heard any lyrics that are as bad as the ones Marisa has pointed out from First Impressions of the Earth, although I couldn't really tell you what the words to any of the songs are, even the ones I like the best. In addition to "Under Cover of Darkness," there are some more straightforward Strokes-sounding songs that manage to sound not quite like carbon copies of their best past work: "Taken for a Fool," stupidly titled but swinging "Gratisfaction," the ballad-y "Call Me Back." I bet I'd be happy if someone threw this on at a party, the way Is This It still sounded fresh in the spring of 2002 when my Drawing I instructor put it on during our still-life studies. But what I'm not really hearing in this record is why the Strokes wanted to make it and what, if anything, they wanted to say.
Often it seems like side projects come from individual band members getting big heads about their role in the band's success, or getting sick of the band's success or sound or whatever. I get the sense that all these Strokes side projects came from everyone in the Strokes being totally bored with the Strokes. Fair enough. But I also get the sense that Angles was recorded out of obligation -- that everyone in the Strokes who is bored of being in the Strokes also feels that they probably should soldier on and continue being in the Strokes, for the sake of... well, that's where I wasn't so clear. Who do the Strokes think they're pleasing by staying together when it seems like they'd rather not, or are, at best, indifferent to doing so? I'm pretty sure they were never as big as the White Stripes as their peak, and they were never such a huge touring presence that they've cultivated these thousands upon thousands of clamoring fans. Obviously, there are Strokes fans out there, but anyway, do they seem like this crowdpleasing band anyway? Are they playing Madison Square Garden tonight because they feel like their fans really want to see them at MSG?
Over the past month or two, I think I've come across the answer: the Strokes stayed together for rock critics. There is something mainstream rock writers find absolutely irresistible about these guys; residual affection, perhaps, from when they attempted to save rock and roll ten years ago (a gesture that, in retrospect, was probably unnecessary, but also, still, appreciated given the Creed/Bizkit/Nickelback dynasty on modern rock radio at the time). So that's why the run-up to this totally decent and unspectacular (and, for the near decade of hemming and hawing, not so far removed from the pros and cons of Room on Fire) record was covered with such fervor: rock writers really, really wanted to write a Strokes cover story and were afraid they wouldn't get to!
I have to imagine, then, that there was a near-riot at the SPIN offices when their staff found out freelancer Sloane Crosley, she of those personal essays that may be amusing but often feel like much ado about near-nothing that any number of your friends could replicate and probably out-write without much trouble, would be doing the Strokes profile for their April issue. Maybe that's an unfair generalization, but SPIN seems to have a stake in the Strokes. Witness their April masthead, where nine staff names were appended with their selection for favorite Strokes song. I know Rob found my incredulity that NONE of them fucking mentioned "Last Nite" as that song kind of silly, but seriously: two of them chose songs from First Impressions and one of them chose a B-side that later became a song from First Impressions. And more to the point, is the Strokes really a deep-cut sort of band where it's interesting to hear what someone's favorite is? I guess maybe, if there's the novelty of it not being a song from Is This It, but really: the Strokes have about 50 songs. Total. After ten years. But here they are on the SPIN masthead like they've just released a retrospective box set rather than just scraped together a fourth record.
The Crosley piece isn't quite as convergently terrible as a SPIN profile of the Strokes written by Sloane Crosley threatens to be. In a way, having a less experienced music journalist write the piece feels like the magazine is admitting something, however tacitly: they need to hire a writer with some of her own personal style to actually make this band seem a little more interesting. Crosley does add some nice, more writerly touches to the profile, I must admit. But, as per usual from what else I've read of her, she puts herself into the piece by making observations that are sometimes amusing and mildly off-kilter, but just as often not especially important or interesting -- funny or faux-funny asides and wordplay she can add in to show that it's her interviewing this band (one at a time, naturally), not some anonymous writer. It's the simulation of a unique perspective.
When it comes time for her to discuss the band, it has the slight hint of someone who is just learning how to write about music. The Strokes seem to matter to her because, like you, she remembers them from college, or her friends: "If half the guys I know could bottle the band up and spray themselves with eau de Is This It, they would." I think this is supposed to speak to the cultural hold the Strokes maintain, but to me it speaks more to who Sloane Crosley hangs out with on weekends. One of the band members plays her Angles early, and after some cajoling she offers the appraisal that "most of the tracks... are so instantly catchy that the couple songs that don't measure up are like iodine in your throat." If you adjust this against the music-magazine hype and the accompanying attempt to overcorrect, what she is actually saying is more like: the album is pretty decent overall; it's got some duff tracks in addition to many clear highlights. Maybe that's presumptuous of me, to dismiss her feelings as a starrier-eyed, dressed-up version of my feelings. I'll put it another, less presumptuous but more directly disagreeable way: no, nothing on Angles is bracing enough to feel like iodine in your throat.
Finally, towards the end of the article, Crosley drops this observation:
"The Strokes are in a marriage. Who among us can pick out a movie with four other people, forget make four albums?"
Well, I don't know, I feel like I know a lot of people who could pick a movie with four other people. Obviously fewer of them could make four albums, sure. But a lot of bands do it. A lot bands get way past four albums. I'm not suggesting being in a band isn't a somewhat fragile, bizarre, perhaps unnatural state, but nor am I so sure we should be gazing in admiration at the Strokes for managing to stick with their major-label-supported, famous-before-they-had-an-album band.
Sometimes journalists writing about the Strokes remind me of girls in college going on about Guster: I can see how it would be mindblowing if you hadn't heard that many bands before.
I know I'm talking a lot about the band's image, press, and attitude, moreso than how their songs actually sound, so I'm as guilty as anyone of talking about the Strokes, not really talking about their music. But here's the thing about their music: it's pretty good. They have a sound, sometimes they play around with it, but they basically have this one thing halfway between the Velvet Underground and the Cars, and they do it pretty well. There are a lot of bands that do this. Not average the Cars and the VU, but stay true to a catchy but rather specialized sound. The Rural Alberta Advantage, as I mentioned a few thousand words ago. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart just put out an album that, while is noticeable the nineties-influenced version of their sound versus the previous record's eighties-influenced version of their sound, still, you know, pretty much what you'd expect the Pains of Being Pure at Heart to sound like if you've heard a song or two of theirs. For me, the Strokes is one of those specialty type bands. They're never going to be your favorite, but sometimes you want to hear something that sounds just like that.
So why do the White Stripes and the Hold Steady and Vampire Weekend and countless other indie-rock type bands who also have a fairly particular and consistent (if more expansive than, say, RAA or Pains) sound seem so much worthier of attention, to me, than the Strokes? I think the common denominator is the feeling that all of those guys really like (or with the White Stripes, liked) (or with Jack White in any other band, like!) being in a band and playing music for a living. The Strokes -- and I realize this is all just baseless analysis and who am I to assume things about their motivations, etc. -- seem to treat it more like a job, and not a musician job so much as a recreating the feeling people had with Is This It job. Their weariness is wearying -- though maybe not so much as the cheerleading that currently accompanies their every move.