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diversions
'Is This It' Strokes
the right way
By Alex Roman
On-line Forty-Niner
Melodic sounds
that crash and turn into each other.
Poetry that is, at times, dark and consistently honest.
These are words you could use to describe the New York-based
band The Strokes' new CD, "Is This It." But if you
were in a different time, you could use these simple words
to describe such other New York luminaries as the Velvet Underground
or Television.
Forget all that. What The Strokes debut CD may very well do
is restore people's faith in rock music, a genre that is being
consumed by the pop-friendly sounds heard ad nauseam on radio
and television.
Bolstered by Julian Casablancas' smoky vocal delivery, The
Strokes are the best thing to come out of the New York club
scene in quite awhile.
Songs like "The Modern Age" and "Soma,"
are driven by the duo guitar sounds of Nick Valensi and Albert
Hammond Jr., while the rhythm section of Nikolai Fraiture
(bass) and Fab Moretti (drums), maintains a groove suitable
for dancing or simply bobbing your head.
On the whole, The Strokes suck you in with their catchy hooks
and vocal melodies - rock tunes simply played like an artist
smattering colors of sound instead of paint.
Meanwhile, Casablancas' poetry jumps topics from mental instability
to love and everything in that gray area between the two,
with an honesty that almost exposes his bare soul for the
listener to see.
On "Hard To Explain," Casablancas sings, "I
say the right thing/but act the wrong way/I like it right
here/but I cannot stay," with an honesty and realness
that is not often heard in music today.
Perhaps this is just what makes "Is This It" so
perfect: the pure reality of it all.
The fact that you can listen to Casablancas' vocals and tell
that he's singing words as if he's feeling them again for
the first time, make you feel their raw sensitivity. All this
while their sound makes you feel as if you can dance your
own feelings away, or at the very least allow them to be transported
out of your mind for 35 minutes.
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Colin
Lane
The Strokes debut their NYC East Village garage
rock in their first major label CD "Is this It."
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