Fuzzy Thoughts

Perhaps they should have taken a cue from The White Stripes and quit while they were ahead.

Release Date: March 22, 2011
Record Label: RCA
Rating: 55

Nostalgia is a tricky beast– and there are few things in life as bad as swearing that something was great, only to revisit it and find that there was hardly anything special about it at all. Even worse are the times that the things you held dear sputtered out with such futility that it makes you question their original existence. For a decade, a garage rock revival that was seemingly built on nostalgia and featured such acclaimed bands as The White Stripes, The Hives (remember them?) and The Strokes, supposedly saved rock music as we know it– or remembered it. In an odd twist of fate, MTV seemingly embraced this generation of “The” bands, even going so far as featuring a “Battle of the Bands” between The Hives and The Vines. That last sentence is completely laughable now, but at the time it was a pretty big deal.

These days, The Hives are still touring but are largely forgotten (you barely even hear “Hate To Say I Told You So” anymore), joining a cesspool of other bands that people and critics largely rooted for, perhaps against better judgment. Even the bands that most thought could stand the test of time (The White Stripes) have sputtered out. Thankfully, Jack and Meg decided to hang it up before ever releasing something as detrimental as The Strokes’ Angles or First Impressions of Earth.

In what was a notoriously dreadful recording situation, The Strokes did nearly all of their recording separately, using a slapdash approach so problematic that it truly shows on the final product. Julian Casablancas seems as though he saved up all his energy for the lead single and just didn’t care enough to do much more. Also, while there are elements of fine songwriting and the craftsmanship they displayed on their first two albums, The Strokes can’t seem to get out of their own way. It’s truly as though they decided to let their own individual egos duke it out rather than produce a congruent sound, and consequentially as a listener you’re subjected to a nonsensical, occasionally worthless, trite and overtly pretentious set of songs that contain as much hot air as a Kanye West tweet.

Truth be told, we all should have seen this coming, but we all wanted to believe in the nostalgia that is Is This It?, an album so lauded that one could argue that it destroyed the band if it weren’t for their follow-up Room on Fire. It was then that people thought, perhaps unfairly, that maybe this New York City band could be the rock n’ roll saviors the critics wanted to be after all.

Now, thirteen years since the bands formation, the whole affair feels as forced as a Charlie Sheen joke, and Angles stands as the final straw in a charade where a band who (correctly or incorrectly) was thought to be the epitome of a new millenium rock n’ roll cool, instead showed their true colors of apathy and delusive grandeur.

You can stream Angles in its entirety from The Strokes’ website.