The Strokes
Is This It (RCA)
by Marc Hirsh
The Strokes
Is This It (RCA)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002
Julian Casablancas has many things going for him that make him a great frontman. He's got a voice that splits the difference between U2 and Fountains of Wayne, coming across as too cool (rather than merely too bored) to bother with such pesky things as passion and range. He is utterly confident in his own charm and possesses a relaxed buoyancy that all but convinces listeners of the same. And, let it be mentioned, he's got a great name. He clearly has vocal limitations, though, and that's where the final piece of the great-frontman puzzle comes in: he leads a band that's ideally suited to make the most of his abilities. Despite a degree of hype usually unseen outside the British music press, the Strokes make good on their reputation by being, quite frankly, cooler than you.
It's evident that Casablancas's voice is just another instrument in the Strokes' arsenal not just by its place in the mix of Is This It (buried just like another guitar waiting to be unpacked from the cat's cradle of the band's noise) but by the way it's processed. Foregoing the standard tricks of reverb and boost usually utilized to enhance the vocals, the Strokes take the riskier tactic of EQing off Casablancas's upper and lower frequencies and, I think, distorting what's left just enough to emphasize the Bonoesque roughness of his yowls.
The Strokes' use of Casablancas is, in fact, identical to how all of the instruments are put to use on Is This It. The guitars form a sort of lockstep drone with embellishments in the same way that the drums take on the repetitive perfection of a loop, while Nikolai Fraiture provides the opening "Is This It" with the best bassline-as-alternate-melody since Spacehog's "In The Meantime" as a bait-and-switch before holding a deadly steady anchor for most of the rest of the album. The instruments are layers upon layers within a single plane, each part simple enough on its own but filling in an almost mathematically intricate pattern of sound when combined with the others. It's like listening to Crazy Rhythms just before the speakers blow.
The machine is so fine-tuned that it ultimately doesn't matter where Is This It is going. A masterpiece of sonics, the album is something of a cipher when it comes to substance. The reduction (or, depending on your point of view, exaltation) of Casablancas's voice to the position of mere instrument makes most of what he sings utterly irrelevant (good thing, since the mix makes picking out the words over the notes a task), and more than a few songs are carried on little more than a hook and an attitude of alienated cool. The Strokes are, when taken as a purely conceptual construct, direct descendants of the Cars more than anything else (Casablancas hits what I'm guessing is an unintentional Ben Orr imitation more than once). The difference is a matter of scale; each song on Is This It is something of a microcosm of what unfolded over the course of 35 minutes on The Cars. Individually, the songs are more or less unimpeachable, but the album has no center and seems to reset at the start of every track. The Cars had that problem licked at the start of their careers. The Strokes play as if they'll have plenty of time to address it in the future.