Has it really been 10 years since The Strokes burst onto the scene behind a blizzard of (mostly justified) hype? A lot has changed since the NYC fivesome’s first album, Is This It, debuted a month after 9/11 and only weeks before Apple unveiled the iPod, but my memory of their sold-out Southgate House tour stop on Oct. 4, 2001, remains seared in my cortex. (We pimped the show with a cover story by Brian Baker even though the album didn’t hit the street until Oct. 9; Is This It‘s Sept. 25 release was delayed a few weeks when RCA decided to take “New York City Cops” off the finished album.) —-
From my review of the show, which ran in the Nov. 8, 2001, issue of CityBeat: “The Strokes ignite in a live setting, not only besting their staid-in-comparison studio output but obliterating it completely. … By the time (frontman Julian) Casablancas threw down his mic on the well-stained red carpet of the Southgate stage, all but the most hard-bitten cynic was (or should have been) converted. Saviors of Rock & Roll? I don’t know. But they did — as Casablancas claims is their lone goal — ‘rock people’s balls off.’ ”
As we now know, The Strokes were no saviors. They put out a stellar second album (2003’s Room on Fire) and a mediocre third (2006’s First Impression of Earth) before fading from view almost completely in the late 2000s. Yet one landmark album — Is This It still sounds as fresh as the day it surfaced — is a pretty good legacy for anybody.
After five years on the sidelines — a period in which each Stroke was involved in at least one side project — the band reemerges March 22 with its long-gestating fourth album, Angles. The kickoff to what will no doubt be an extensive round of touring is Sunday in Las Vegas (no Cincinnati date has yet been announced), but the boys gave us a peek of what to expect on Saturday Night Live last weekend.
The first song, “Under Cover of Darkness,” was classic Strokes — which is to say it was taut, classic ’70s-inspired Post Punk driven by Fab Moretti’s propulsive drumming, Casablancas monotone yet impassioned vocals and the frenzied, interweaving guitars of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. And while Casablancas was nowhere near the amusingly drunken spectacle of the early days, he did get in a seemingly improvised “fuck it” near the end of the song.
The second song, “Life is Simpler in the Moonlight,” was a mid-tempo quasi-ballad in which a wistful (it was hard to confirm since he covered his eyes with sunglasses) Casablancas sang about a girl that disappointed him in some way. Or maybe not — it was difficult to discern with the singer spending more time harmonizing with the music than in trying to clearly enunciate the lyrics.
On an aesthetic level, the guys looked pretty much the same — though Hammond’s wild ’fro is now more closely cropped, and Moretti’s equally streamlined locks looked as though they were styled as an homage to Rhett Butler. All in all, it was a nice appetizer to the main-course album/tour to come and a reminder just much the scene has changed since The Strokes went into hibernation — SNL host Miley Cyrus was 8 when Is This It hit.
This article appears in Mar 2-8, 2011.