Rough Trade

When the Beta Band deemed their self-titled debut album proper “fucking awful” upon its release 12 years ago, most fans knew such defeatist talk should be taken with a very large grain of salt. I mean here was a band that routinely tried to piss off their bosses, blowing advances on luxuries such as £4,000 Velcro suits with letters that could be arranged to read anything from "Beta" to "Iraq." Miserable recording experiences, likewise, needn’t always alert panic. Fleetwood Mac may have had a far closer relationship with their busy cocaine dealer than each other in the mid 70s but they still managed a masterpiece in Rumours. Members of Big Star physically fought each other around the same time and Yeah Yeah Yeahs left their studio barely on speaking terms 30 years later but Radio City and Show Your Bones merit the same revered status in these reviewer’s eyes. Yet when The Strokes admit to having had problems in the studio and not be particularly enthusiastic about the results just one album after the first major misstep of their up ‘til then blistering career, it may be time to get worried.

That concern is almost entirely borne out on Angles, the bewilderingly uneven, five-years-in-the-waiting successor to the overblown and underwhelming First Impressions Of Earth. While the New Yorkers’ third album went where no Strokes album should ever go: significantly over the 35 minute mark, their fourth comes in at an encouraging 34 minutes and 43 seconds. So far so good then. Opener ‘Machu Picchu’ too offers hope by brilliantly combining the band’s solo work and side projects from the intervening years with what came before. There’s a touch of the needly guitars that were littered throughout Julian Casablancas’ Phrazes Of The Young, a little of Little Joy’s partiality towards reggae but the whole thing explodes into life once Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr’s guitars enter the fray. The pair’s paw marks are all over single ‘Under Cover Of Darkness’ as well, which along with ‘Taken For A Fool’ five tracks in, are the most “Strokes” sounding of songs here.

Yet things start to unravel very quickly. Indeed it takes just three tracks for traces of a rot setting in when the spacey ‘You’re So Right’ comes off like a castoff  from the Phrazes Of The Young sessions, with some neat echoed vocals unable to save the day. And while ‘Two Kinds Of Happiness’ foray into new wave territory is saved somewhat by a killer guitar hook, the same can’t be said for the chillwavey ‘Games’. Frankly they should leave that shit to Twin Shadow. The second half of the album is seriously forgettable and continues to swing wildly between styles. Once the clearly disjointed five-piece start to sound like a bad Steely Dan (the DREADFUL ‘Gratisfacation’), you have to ask yourself whether this is the same band that recorded Is This It?

It’s not. Their classic debut may sound as fresh today as it did when it turned indie music on its head a decade ago, but The Strokes have aged very badly. Whereas First Impressions at least went in a certain direction, albeit the wrong one after the band railed against unfair criticism that Room On Fire was “too Strokes”, they are all over the shop on Angles and it makes for generally painful listening. It’s no surprise that Valensi described the fractured recording process - Casablancas practically phoned in his vocals - as “awful– just awful.” He went on to tell Pitchfork in the same interview that “the best thing we can do right now is put out another [album] really quick,” a statement that led another web heavy hitter Stereogum to ask the very valid question: What’s the point in keeping the Strokes going? On this evidence, it may be time to call it a day before any further damage is done.

If Antony and the Johnsons’ third album, 2009’s The Crying Light, didn’t have quite the seismic impact of its predecessor I Am A Bird Now, it nevertheless fulfilled an important role; as well as securing Antony Hegarty’s position as an artist committed to his own vision, it also demonstrated that he clearly wasn’t going to suffer at the hands of industry moguls looking to spruce up his sound for mainstream appetites. 
 
But whereas The Crying Light was a work of spare, monochrome beauty, Swanlights adds splashes of colour and texture to the mix. The swirling strings on ‘Salt Silver Oxygen’ and ‘I’m In Love’ are reminiscent of Owen Pallett (surely the only other artist operating in this rarefied space right now) and his masterful Heartland LP from earlier this year. Backwards tapes and the insistent buzz of an electric guitar underpin the title track here – combining with Hegarty’s overlapping vocals, they create an atmosphere of exceptional eeriness that reminded this listener a little of Radiohead’s ‘Pyramid Song’. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, ‘Thank You For Your Love’ is as light as air; blasted along by chirpy brass, it’s this record’s most immediate and euphoric moment, its ‘Kiss My Name’ or ‘Fistful of Love’.
 
It’s no over-egged pudding, though, and Antony proves once again here his mastery of the most intimate of recordings: a barely strummed acoustic guitar accompanies the sumptuous ‘The Great White Ocean’ – a song exploring lyrical terrain that will be familiar to fans, as Hegarty imagines dying before the rest of his family. Elsewhere, ‘The Spirit Was Gone’ finds Antony in his most familiar setting: at the piano, flanked by hushed strings – it is exquisitely sad. There’s barely a false step throughout; perhaps only ‘Fletta’, a duet with Björk, (surprisingly) lets the side down. The collaboration should be a recipe for success, and in fairness the song does eventually get going, but not until after you’ve waited an age for it to do so.
 
Although the opening track here is entitled ‘Everything Is New’, that may not be strictly true: that singular voice, and much of the instrumentation and lyrical themes will be familiar to converts. But listening to Swanlights reminds me of a scene from the Coen Brothers’ ‘A Serious Man’ in which the junior rabbi tries to get the titularly sober Larry to look at the world anew, and try to find beauty in the parking lot outside his office. What’s so impressive is that, three albums into what now constitutes a gold run of form, Hegarty sounds not in the least jaded by success – still more than capable of looking at the world anew, he radiates a sense of youthful wonder.

Having been voted Worst Band of The Year in the NME’s 1998 readers poll, Embrace’s Danny MacNamara welcomed the award: "The more people that don’t like us hate us, the more those that like us will love us", he said. Whatever you think of Embrace’s stodgy brand of lighters-aloft arena-rock, it’s hard to argue with the sentiment, and it’s one with which The Hold Steady would surely empathise. This is the ultimate marmite band, their extraordinary mid-period records Separation Sunday and Boys and Girls in America not so much dividing opinion as forcibly splitting music fans into two camps: those baffled that a pub-rock band with tuneless vocals could be heralded as among the best in America, and those for whom The Hold Steady were not so much a band as a way of life. 

This writer falls into the latter: acclaiming rock lyrics as poetry is generally a fool’s errand, but in Craig Finn The Hold Steady had a writer of exceptional quality. His rich, poignant, occasionally surreal and always wonderfully detailed vignettes consistently seemed to me every bit as great as Finn’s literary heroes, American fiction heavyweights such as Richard Ford, Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski. 

But after a run of four consecutive winners, they come unstuck on album number five. The signs were there on 2008’s Stay Positive that they may have peaked – it was still a great album, but one or two weaker tracks and occasional re-treading of old lyrical themes were indications that it might have been time to sell your shares in The Hold Steady. The weak spots are weaker and more frequent here, and there’s an overwhelming feeling that Finn hasn’t quite put the same immediacy or urgency into his lyrics this time around. They describe this as a "less anthemic" record, and it is, about half the time anyway. They’ve taken Stay Positive’s Dylanesque 'Both Crosses' as their departure point, aiming for a more considered, almost folksy approach, but it lacks in colour and excitement. As it happens, 'Both Crosses' is a track that always had me reaching for the fast-forward button. The departed Franz Nicolay’s keyboard flourishes are undoubtedly missed, while 'Hurricane J’s' story of a girl waiting tables and hanging with the wrong crowd is just old hat for this band. There’s none of the thrilling details or savage violence that made Separation Sunday’s legendary character Holly so utterly fascinating. 

All told, it’s one trip too many to the same well for musical and lyrical inspiration. Craig Finn will have to go off and dream it all up again. Don’t write him off though – he’s certainly too talented not to be able to do so. 

The Strokes’ 'Is This It' came in at No.2 in the Ragged Words Albums of the Decade poll and, whatever avant-garde purists will tell you, its position was entirely deserved. No other record changed the musical landscape so much over the course of the noughties, or conjured up such giddy excitement at the time of release. In 2001, indie music was non-existent, the charts were over-run with unlistenable mummy-I-wet-myself nu-metal and the NME was being forced to go deeper and deeper underground for cover ‘stars’. The Strokes’ arrival was like a bolt of lightening. Supremely hip, arrogant and beautiful, their press photos were better than most bands' entire albums.

And then there was the music – when this then-21-year-old music obsessive first set ears on The Modern Age and Hard to Explain it was as if the gates to a new world were opening. Here was a band to put the sex, glamour and fast songs back into rock and roll. This was the ultimate band-as-gang and in Julian Casablancas they had an ace card, the man with the talent: he wrote all the songs, he had the voice of a generation and was such a compelling frontman he didn’t even have to move on stage.

How then, has it come to this? By my count, this is the fifth quite-good-to-fair solo album from The Strokes stable, and all indications point to the band’s stodgy third record being their last. Meanwhile, Razorlight, Kings of Leon and any number of inferior acts rack up the mega sales that The Strokes deserved. The disappointment is all the more acute for the sequencing of Phrazes for the Young: the first four songs are pretty much fantastic. On first listen, at the halfway mark you could be forgiven for thinking Julian Casablancas has rediscovered his mojo. Sounding like, well, The Strokes with more synths, the signature buzzy hooks, needly guitars and sleepy vocals are immediately recognisable and instantly winning. Even better, '4 Chords of the Apocalypse' confirms the suspicion I've always had that Casablancas could be a great soul balladeer - after all, wasn't 'Under Control' the best song on Room on Fire?

But it all falls apart horribly over a woeful second half. 'Ludlow St.' is an attempt at a country lilt, but it just doesn't come off. River of Brake Lights is even worse, a tunesless mess, while 'Glass' takes over five minutes to go precisely nowhere. It's a crushing let-down after the great start. A bit like The Strokes' career in microcosm.