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These days - during long car trips - I mostly listen to Gino Paoli. I mean, let's say it, this fantastic octogenarian, if I remember correctly, has written the most beautiful Italian love songs of all time (67 parole d'amore, Io so perché l'amore, Averti addosso). Yet, from one folder to another, instead of Luigi Tenco or at least Enzo Jannacci, the Strokes pop up. Well, eh, yeah. On Fridays, I always played them out loud until roughly last Friday. In the hills, they are a delight on the narrow road and the continuous hairpin bends, where you never see the oncoming cars and, when they suddenly appear in front of you, you look at them with anger. Oh, yes. The climb to the first hill starts off terribly. There, there's that damn black and white portrait of Mussolini with a helmet, on the wall of some kind of crappy tavern, that makes me sick every time, damn it! At Carnival - finally - someone turned it into a clown. But the owner, perhaps the only one to notice a substantial difference, restored the colors in a Manichean way. Probably while doing tests against the wall...
The Struccols/Strokes finally prevail as I overtake a truck on the right (supplying soft cheeses to a local frozen food factory) and I rush onto a flat stretch, a real straight labyrinth, where I exceed 110, when needed, that is, always, to catch up a bit...
The Strokes are a bunch of goofballs, let's be clear. A toilet brush is more sympathetic, more human, than Julian Casablancas, whose presumption and (cosmic) narcissism can induce hilarity, or, at most, philosophical resignation. If his truest inspiration were to be a garden gnome, only then, would he be grand. Baths of humility bestow virtues.
However, The Adults Are Talking bounces, twirls in the cabin, outlines that gutsy rock of which it makes a kind of compendium, with the first guitar not too sharp but rasping subtly pursuing a serrated melody and exchanging tones with the second guitar that warbles, which then, for some unknown reason, they chase each other on the vintage chiasms of the synth, deftly pitching; meanwhile, the bass jumps around pulsing with the heart of a chubby sparrow, while the percussion pins down transcendental patterns. This approach, a bit opportunistic, that is, a bit clever and a bit from the arse, has the same barely concealed liveliness of a brat kicking, pretending to be rebellious, but is just hyperactive and visually impaired. But this is the strength of the "New Abnormal": managing to emerge – sometimes - from obvious constraints.
That sound, although measured, is eager. It seems free, precisely, at the best moments. Julian applies himself to singing and hums without particular talents and without certainties, except the one that, if he were a fish, he would be a sculpin. But when he shouts vowels without much sense, in rhapsodic moments, it's liberating. It adds a pinch of wit to a very own spurious existential malaise, simulated more than presumed, axiomatic rather than experienced, all attributable to mere egocentrism; but the young one, in the end, seeks refuge precisely from himself. So the game works. Why? Could it be the band that truly bails him out? I think this is it. They give it all they've got. The various Albert Hammond Jr. (guitar), Nick Valensi (guitar), Fabrizio Moretti (drums), and Nikolai Fraiture (bass), real nerds, constantly torn between tense nerves and full balls, do their duty, moderating the idiosyncrasies of their frontman, whose genius, however, is still well-closed in the lamp and anyway seems destined to be histrionic. The sum of the parts, in their case, leads to a wrong result. And this imperfection, or if you prefer minority, makes them work wonderfully. So, episodically, with "The New Abnormal", I enjoy like a hedgehog (famously the most punk animal, paired with the llama).
By the way. I have seen donkeys around here, climbing on foot towards some isolated hamlets, that seem to be something from another time (then maybe folks are there in their homes rubbing their eyes on the freedom they call Netflix). Well, for those pieces of donkey, there's no need for Casablancas and mates. I'm talking about real donkeys. They have a breathtaking view of the valley (by the way, if children live up here, they are Heidi and Peter!). But for all the other honorary donkeys, like me, who aspire to have goosebumps and a beef heart, there are those punks of the Strokes. After twenty years - for heaven's sake, I say this personally - they are the ones who remain, unlike the White Stripes, Arctic Monkeys, Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, The Killers; I only save Yeah Yeah Yeahs, partially, and The Kills, in their entirety. The Struccols can serve a purpose. They are a propellant sometimes; they are the bicarbonate soda in a half glass of beige tap water - related to acquemammolo and aquepisolo; they are a light brown accent on the words "half price," a liaison to transition to something else, the very idea of waiting (which makes you a little exuberant). Something that can also not go wrong. The strange psalmody that I presume they recite idyllically...
Mom, look, I'm about to get back to work, I've turned 40 and I have a fixed-term job, the best I could do. Mom, look, I'm making a rock album, but it's not to hurt you. Mom, dad, but is it rock or its orthogonal projection?
Yes, I like many faces I see on Friday, more than one, but one, then, quite a lot, and, fortunately, of Casablancas, instead, I only hear the voice, in the background, squeaking even when it is nothing more than a falsetto buzzing in the distance. After getting some work done, I can put on the headphones of the mp3 player, the one that accompanies me every night in the arms of Morpheus, but with Gino Paoli to climb the mountain (to see the donkeys), to descend (to see the stars) the Struccols are good again. There is a great smell of trees. And specifically of wood, where they are cutting them... What would Gino Paoli think of the Strucchi? He wouldn't like them at all. And Heraclitus, of the Strokes? That only in pop changes do they have a purpose?
Bad Decisions is a parody of My Generation, I feel it. When he distorts the chorus and instead of saying "Making bad decisions" he says "M kin bdddeci-sio", he stumbles over the syllables, he stutters. This generation of stutterers will not be given the task of freeing from slavery in Egypt, maybe. Or maybe yes? And if behind the Strokes, there was civic commitment? Let's not talk nonsense... Holy shit, an ethos in the Strokes? This generation doesn't cross the Red Sea, nor the Rubicon. It doesn't even jump over a ditch. Millennials? But what the hell, I already have to get down, descend, go back to work, earn my daily frico; keep me at least away from Gino ("Se fossi un sorriso aprirei la tua bocca/ se fossi un sogno abiterei il tuo sonno", Holy Christ, did you really have to write this stuff! How on earth do you find words so concrete and sublime to describe these things?); help Strucchi, rescue me Struccolo (well, the good gubana is the giant one!). I need the Strokes! Here we go!
It's a pity that the songs of this album are not all blood pumping through the veins, bubbling so much that you then have to stop for a bit to wait for your soul. And some seem just like eggs laid by another hen (such as the producer Rick Rubin). But, as Julian Casablancas seems to say, we are just forty-year-olds/men who pity themselves or miss onions. For now. But at least we try to have the air of someone who, with his musky water on the cheeks, doesn't need to ask... After all, even Leonard Cohen wrote for the girls! And sure, even Ginone. Yes, yes.
Not bad that guitar zigzagging, come on. Just a step away from being beyond. We were close to making a great album, but who cares! Just go back to the first for that, to that fine work of Buddy Holly+Ramones+Television freeze-dried, garage spirit, rock'n'roll and new wave/post-punk revival that intoxicates, dazes and befuddles with enthusiasm and slovenliness. Or let's take that definitive, delirious, occasionally anti-bourgeois, and pruriently cynical single called One Way Trigger... But even this new work of the five, or at least four, not entirely sclerotized musicians, is not to be discarded; if ethics, then, can be circumscribed to obsessions for their own baseball team, well, they are untouchable. At the right moment, you can pull out the Strokes of 2020, before falling into a chasm. After all, "The Hits," who clearly are not "The Clash," don't take themselves too seriously anymore; and how could they? They know they can go to waste. And this saves and promotes them. At least on Fridays.
Oh, making bad decisions
Uh-oh, making bad decisions
I'm making bad decisions for you
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