The Strokes - First Impressions of Earth

review by nick
5.2 out of 10

It’s impossible, you know. Cognitively, babies aren’t able to discern their first moments on the planet to tell us what it must be like to first glimpse the new. Thank god for that, too. Blood and monster thighs aren’t exactly the pleasurable greeting in which good times are made. So, judging from this, the new title could either mean a visit from extraterrestrials or a metaphor for reevaluating the already witnessed world. I’ll place money on the latter.

Yes, things have changed. Fortunately, the Strokes have not discovered god - though he apparently wants to talk to you on “Ask Me Anything” -, hired an orchestra, or let the drummer, Fab, sing. What they have done is expand their initial self-imposed restrictions in favor of exploring new avenues of their sound. Namely there are drum fills now, guitar solos that last long than four bars, and free forming song structures that don’t feel like they were constructed by your high school algebra teacher. The sound, which is both more polished thanks to the production and more free because of the loss of structure, makes First Impressions of Earth strangely distinctive record stuffed full of ideas that are almost always interesting.

So why is it so unsatisfying?

Certainly the atrocious production helps nothing, which strips any of the warmth of the guitars and removes the distortion from Julian’s voice. But the flaw runs deeper down to the basic principles that made the band so exciting in the first place.

It’s just hard to express why the pause in “Hard to Explain” means more than than the entirety of First Impressions. It had seemed so simple before. Right after the bridge in “12:51”, exactly 1:56 into the song, Fab switches from high hat to the cymbal, and the song, which had seemed calculated and methodical, picks up a swagger that greedier bands would have thrown away at the beginning. In “Someday” right after Julian lets out “I’m not wasting no more time”, the band breaks down to a simple drum pattern - 1:41 into the song - with the bass simply playing the basic notes with Julian’s suddenly high whispers in the background. I won’t even get into the one note opening to “Last Night”.

The album does start promisingly with “You Only Live Once”, because it has an interesting melody and knows exactly when to end. From then on begins the game of isolating the good moments out of the rest of the mess. The ending to the much maligned “Juicebox”, races forwards and backwards with the kind of urgency that they first explored with the excellent “Reptilia”. The left-field contribution, “Ask Me Anything”, which removes all the guitars and drums, replacing them with a melatron, is much better than it has any right to be.

But that’s really where the significant departures end. The most significant change, has less to do with new styles of music, than with the loss of restraint. In previous rockers like Room on Fire’s “The End Has No End”, the full throttle assault seemed to be reigned in right before the maximum impact could be reaped. “Fear of Sleep” not only goes from broke, but goes for seconds, unleashing a torrent of guitars and wall to wall screams. This is not a compliment.

The cool-tag first ascribed to the Strokes during the release of their debut Is This It, might seem to be a curse, but it really was what made them interesting in the first place. And I don’t mean that I only liked them because they looked, sounded, and acted cool. What the cool actually represented, and where Is This It’s and Room on Fire’s much touted power came from was the complete insular focus. No guitar line was played without incessant grooming. No snare hit without approval. It pressed no sonic boundaries, because it was too busy worrying how it looked in the mirror.

That half of the album is catchy, enthralling, and inspired means that it is worth the plunge. But great ideas don’t exactly mean great songs, and First Impressions seriously lacks anything in the league of the singles that were littered through Is This It and Room on Fire. That ultimately means First Impressions fails not in spite of its imagination but because of it.