The Strokes
Is This It?

THE REVIEW

Few bands give me diarrhea as much as the Strokes. 5 pretty boy posers, sons of billionaires, used to snorting coke off the asses of dad Casablancas' models, unable to play a single instrument.

These spoiled brats with “such peculiar names” (veeeery cooool!) haven't really done anything wrong: they created a little band during their luxurious New York high school days: they couldn’t manage much, but it was the best way to hook up between snorts and weekends at the beach house in Long Island. Everyone does it, right? Then someone decided it was time to revive “rock and roll” (??!), after years of the charts being dominated by the likes of Prodigy and Limp Bizkit: and there you have it. All the media getting off talking about this album, and showering them with praise even now, after these clowns are in commercial decline. While someone like Jack White had to work his ass off for years to achieve deserved success, while a genius like Neil Hagerty keeps hanging around the dive bars. But time is notoriously a gentleman, and today it's clear that listening to the first album by the Strokes proves those right who always thought they were crap.

The sound is pathetic: a totally incapable drummer, only able to repeat wheezy marches (but he’s sleeping with Drew Barrymore, all very cool and New York!), a bassist who makes Novoselic look like Les Claypool by comparison, two guitarists who literally crawl over the 6-string, achieving a pathetic and monotonous sound while recycling the riffs of the Feelies and mundane solos. Let’s then draw a veil of pity over the singer, and his voice made unbearable by the conifers in his nose. A flat and inconclusive record, an unbearable flop between deflated marches like “some day” or “soma” and winks to Brit pop “trying your luck”, “barely legal” or “the modern age”, because right in England, next to Oasis, they might appreciate a band like this. Not a spark, not a surge but everything incredibly monotonous, as if the Pixies played in an old folks' home 30 years on, like in “take it or leave it”. Rock made specifically to be the soundtrack to a Calvin Klein fashion show.

It's incredible how when talking about these asshats, Velvet Underground and Television were mentioned: two of the most original bands ever, what the hell do they have to do with these ??? Phrases like “sounds like Lou Reed in 1977”, “reminds one of Waiting for the Man”, “riffs straight out of Marquee Moon”. Either certain people have wax glued in their ears, or it was the classic way to grease the wheels, sell more records and newspapers. The Velvet in rock were excess, the representation of a sick society: these guys can just about spend the evening partying and snorting with Lapo, after he leaves the Kissinger study on Fifth Avenue.

Crazy stuff.