I’ve been flirting in and around the post-punk revival style now but in reading about it on Wikipedia and AllMusic, the same four bands keep coming up as giving birth to the genre: Franz Ferdinad, Interpol, Editors and The Strokes.

When I listened to Interpol, I thought there was a little bit of The Strokes in there and I’ve heard Franz Ferdinand many times, so I thought it was time to dust off an album I’ve had for ages but very rarely listened to.

I like The Strokes, but I often find myself just listening to the ‘singles’ rather than the albums. My habit of ‘cherry picking’ songs got so bad that I only dug out Reptillia from my music library because it was on a Guitar Hero game. That ‘crime’ still didn’t result in me listening to the whole album (Room On Fire) just rating Reptillia as a 5 star and letting the auto-playlists pick it up.

On that frank admission, most of the Strokes debut album has been long ignored.  Only This Modern Age, Last Nite, Hard To Explain and Take It Or Leave It would have found themselves on the play list at some point. (And I must admit that Hard To Explain would have been because of the Mash-Up with Christina Agluera – I went through a phase of loving mash-ups the best being Boulevard of Broken Wonderwall)

I loved this album when it first came out and would have been one of the first ‘guitar albums’ I would have got alongside White Ladder, Performance and Cocktails, Parachutes and The Man Who - the albums that I look back and see where my love affair with Indie and guitar bands come from.

Ranked highly on AcclaimedMusic (putting it 2nd best album in 2010′s behind only Arcade Fire’s debut Funeral, beating Radiohead, Arctic Monkeys and well ahead of The Killer’s Hot Fuss that hit a massively wide audience) I can see why it was so highly rated, but at the same time I can see why the album hasn’t reached the biggest of audiences.

But I can’t see WHY it was so well received. Harking back to the AcclaimedMusic list, I own only 3 albums higher than Is This It (Ok Computer, Funeral and Closer). Looking at the other artists who released album 20o1 – Is This It doesn’t appear in the top 10 of album sales (worldwide) - topped by Linkin Park. This album does seem to have been well received by the music industry and less so by the fans.

I use my sister as a barometer of how big a band is. If she’s heard of them and knows one of their songs, they either are huge, currently having a song played by Radio 1 or had a massively huge but ultimately crap one-hit wonder. “Muse are a small band and how how have they sold out is a mystery” – followed by me arguing that Muse are definitely one of the biggest export the UK music industry has in the current climate, possibly behind only The X Factor  and Coldplay.

She has heard of the Strokes.

I do like the album, I’m glad that I’ve started listening to it again, especially as I recently got the new album (which sounds great!), but I still have the same critisims I had before, the guitar is great, it’s very unique among other bands, but the vocals aren’t my favorite and the album becomes very samey samey.

However lets take each song on it’s merits.

The title track opens, and its a song that seemingly goes nowhere. The opening rift does set the album up and its a classic Strokes style song, it’s got those defining vocals and guitar rift, but is maybe not something I would choose to burn to a CD to listen to on long journeys (if I didn’t have mp3s!)

With that style of thinking, theres only a handful of albums I wouldn’t skip if the came on a ‘all music’ play list., The Modern Age, Someday, Hard To Explain,  Take It or Leave It and Last Nite. All are very ‘Strokes-eque’

Hard to Explain being on one of those ‘Mash-Up’ songs with Christina Aguilera and Last Nite was a huge hit and when I was a teenager that song was everywhere!

Listening to the album, I’m finding myself liking the singles again but struggling once again to see what the huge fuss about it was.  The songs are good, but i can’t see how sum of the parts make this much greater hole.

Unlike the Stone Roses or The Queen Is Dead, I was sctaully around when this album came out and I know it was part of the era when guitars were starting to take back the charts, but for me bands like Coldplay, Stereophonics and Travis defined that period.

Maybe a few days of it on repeat may make me fall in love with it like I know I should.

This entry was posted in The Music Project and tagged 00's, American, Partially Heard Before, Post-Punk Revival, The Strokes. Bookmark the permalink.