I think I am excited for the new Strokes album?
I mean, these are the guys that reinvented cool for me. These are the guys that showed me some music sounds better coming out of busted speakers, from a jukebox, in the dive bar down the street. They showed me you didn’t need to shower every day, that Converse should be faded, and to never take your leather jacket off (even in the New York summer).
The Strokes taught me how a band should sound. They demonstrated that energy can shift when one instrument turns on and another turns off. The Strokes taught me that guitar riffs can be hooks, and vocals sound better beaten to a pulp. I mean, The Strokes were my Stones. The Strokes lived on sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll… and managed to step around any cliches. Because amidst hair grease and cigarette ash, was a band that wrote one hell of an explosive album. You believed them, or at least convinced yourself to believe them, because you thought the last great rockstars died out years ago. So why wouldn’t I be excited for a new Strokes album?
Because I’m not sure if these are the same guys that said “Spaceships they won’t understand”.
In fact I know these are not the same guys. The Strokes were some sort of rock ‘n’ roll gang, and together they ruled New York and every model the city could offer up on their bar room tables. They were kids, and were able to have all the attitude needed, without coming off looking like assholes.
The guys that made Is This It probably loved every fucking second of hanging out together, drinking together, and playing music together. You get the idea now that whatever fraternal feelings burned in the group years ago, are gone. And that sense of a band playing, locked in as one, to the point where you’re convinced some sort of combustion is imminent- are gone as well. Of course I could continue with a typical tirade of selling out, image, money, record labels, side projects, producers, bickering, egos, restaurants, electronic music…etc. etc. but I won’t. Yes I am curious to see how Angles (out 3/22) sounds, and hell yes I am excited to see them live. But to me, The Strokes will always be the band that made Is This It.
Download tracks from the MTV 2$ Bill concert below:
01 Machu Picchu
02 Under Cover of Darkness
03 Two Kinds of Happiness
04 You’re So Right
05 Taken for a Fool
06 Games
07 Call Me Back
08 Gratisfaction
09 Metabolism
10 Life Is Simple in the Moonlight
