First impressions of Earth¶
588 words on Strokes
A new album by The Strokes, hooray. After Room on Fire was a solid sophomore album with a number of cool songs and loads of cool lyrics, it predictably failed to keep up with the gold standard as set by Room on Fire. So what’s happening for their third album? Are there exciting new directions or will the band fade to obscurity?
A bit of both, I have to say. On First Impressions of Earth [buy at amazon .com, .de, .uk], they have more brilliant lyrics, a couple of exciting or cool songs, plenty of decent songs and a notable increase in song durations. A quick comparison gives:
| # | ∑ | Ø | Median | Best songs | |
| Is This It | 11 | 36:24 | 3:19 | 3:17 | 2,7,5,11,1 |
| Room On Fire | 11 | 32:28 | 2:57 | 3:00 | 2,6,1 |
| First Impressions Of Earth | 14 | 52:33 | 3:45 | 3:32 | 12,2,10 |
I have a tendency to be sceptical about longer songs, but at the end of the day The Strokes are quite good at avoiding bad moments with those. What I’m more concerned about is the ‘cool’ factor. Back in mid-December the band did a couple of pseudo-secret gigs / press stunts across Europe. Reading the paper after that, it seemed that the author was most impressed by the band being so cool (and he admired that the visiting fans could sing along with the songs from an album that wasn’t even released at the time). But listening to the (studio) album, I have to disagree. The band may still be cool on stage – after all it always looked like acting too cool would be their problem, if any – but their album lacks the distinct cool disconnection that I loved on Is This It.
Lyrics sound like they mean something now. Or rather like they’re supposed to be important. Going from Is This It’s lyrics to You only live once’s requires a long journey. A journey that leaves you with better developed and less charming lyrics. In other words, chances that I could write lyrics like those new ones are much better than chances for me to come up with the old ones… which apart from making things a bit less exciting and a bit more conventional means that those lyrics are well thought-out and cool.
My ultra-short impressions of the songs are:
Good: Juicebox, Fear of Sleep (including >20 repetitions of You’re no fun
and a few others, thus almost beating Clap Your Hands Say Yeah for the most repetitive lyrics), Ize of the world (despite its length my favourite), Red light (Get yourself a lawyer and a gun
, they’re Americans after all)
Nice: You only live once, Razorblade (My feelings are more important than yours
), On the other side (slightly dull in fact, but containing the lines I hate them all / I hate them all / I hate myself for hating them / So I’ll drink some more / I’ll love them all / I’ll drink even more / I’ll hate them even more than I did before
), Ask me anything, Electricityscape (a tad boring, though), Evening Sun
A bit dull: Heart in a cage, Vision of division, Killing lies, 15 Minutes
The album isn’t bad. But to be honest, I had expected a bit more. Or rather, less and possibly shorter songs but with more new directions and ideas. Next we’ll have to see how it stands the test of time, whether it’ll grow on me and how frequently we’ll hear its songs when going out.
