Music
27 Aug 01

Is This It

Every last tune is tight and tailored, no waste, flying economy class. Give that editor an apple.

A good hustler goes by what they got, not what they covet.

The Strokes have just enough to get by, but they flaunt it real well. The first thing you notice about Is This It is that it’s 36 minutes long, half the length of the average CD. This actually displays impeccable horse sense: every last tune is tight and tailored, no waste, flying economy class. Give that editor an apple.

If The Strokes’ style-mag shoots are CBGB circa 1976, the sound is actually closer to Max’s Kansas City one year earlier, that smelly back alley where garage rock got roughed up by the pre-punk boulevardiers. Their strongest songs – ‘The Modern Age’, ‘Last Night’, ‘Hard To Explain’ – reek of fag-end Velvets, Iggy and the Modern Lovers. Which is fine by this candidate: after five years of US punk acts drunk on the dregs of the genre – The Dickies instead of The Voidoids – this is a good thing.

But for all the skinny ties and drainpipes and sneakers, there are few concessions to the bowery performance art of Pere Ubu or Suicide or Television (notwithstanding a ‘See No Evil’ cop on ‘Barely Legal’, and the Pavement gawkiness of the title tune). Rather, the sensibility is closer to Lou’s wide-eyed short stories of the street, Jonathan’s gauche charms, Peter Perrett’s pale sainthood.

You have to be good to play this simple; it’s like the musical equivalent of James Ellroy’s prose, all bitten off and bullet holed. The rhythm guitarists play rhythms rather than chord slabs cloaked in fuzz, and drummer Fabrizio Moretti does a good shuffle (‘Someday’), no fills, total Mo-nimalism. Over all this, Julian Casablancas has mastered both Mr Pop’s croon as well as his rasp (not to mention the Lust For Life vocal-through-a-fucked-speaker-cabinet trick), the little twists of phrasing that make a great vocalist out of an average singer. What’s he singing about? I haven’t a clue. But it sounds like it matters to him, and that’s the important thing.

Is This It would’ve been as fine a rock ‘n’ roll record in ’69, ’77, ’84 or ’91. Don’t believe the hype – just cop a feel.