Angles

The Strokes live rock bands’ life

Aren’t The Strokes a true classic type rock band? It is not about the music the New York-based outfit produces, but about the way its story unfolds, the way it goes on in the life of the ensemble and in lives of its members. So far The Strokes have been doing everything like a good rock band. First, they raised a stir with their finest debut, Is This It, issued in 2001. After that, within a short while, as it was expected, they extended their success with two impressive records, Room of Fire (2003), and First Impressions on Earth (2006), and then… And then we saw them going through what any big rock band goes. The participants of The Strokes disturbed the steady progress of their activity and got themselves into side-projects. A true rock musician, after all, can’t escape a feeling of creative bondage in the tight format of his ensemble, which brings him to wandering and roaming around saying the unsaid and paying the secrets out of his soul. Nobody would have said anything had The Strokes guys walked on the side for a year or two and come back to their band missing each other badly. But they did not. The coma, in which the outfit lay, lasted too long, and the American rockers managed to release their new album, number four, only five years after the third, in 2011.

Angels: stylistic diversity or musical chaos?

The album was given a short title, Angels. Short is the record itself, too, as it does not make even forty minutes. What is even more surprising is that this time everyone on the band took part in the writing. The first single off the new long player, Under Cover Of Darkness, was not a bomb and never exploded charts. Being neither a bad song, nor a real hit, it made a mystery around the upcoming album even more intriguing. The full album proved to be very incoherent. There is a persistent sensation that the musicians failed to think of anything new in there five years and came to a decision to gather the best moments of the previous albums to feature them here. Some tracks are different as much as they can be, like the danceable electronica-stuffed Machu Picchu, and the hard-rock You’re So Right. Taken For A Fool, and Two Kinds Of Happiness are, in their turn, very similar to what the band started out with a decade ago. Gratisfaction drags the listener into the eighties with its nervy glam-rock jingling, while Metabolism drags him into the progressive rock domain where The Stokes seem pretty much confused so far. The common, and the innovative, feature for the whole CD is the computerized distortion of the vocals all over the place and drum machine used.

Angels aftertaste

With its songs so various, Angels will face various reviews too. The good impression from the record is not connected necessarily with its music content, but with the fact that The Stokes resumed their activity after all these years. Since the musicians did not stay away from their craft working in side projects throughout this period they do not seem to have lost any of their good skills, which is a very optimistic sign. The songs of the album are not bad, but they are so different from each other that they seem to be pushing each other out of the set making the whole record suffer. This problem is explainable due to the aforementioned statement that the songs were penned by all the members of the crew, who had already acquired their own musical views while working separately for so long. What is alarming is how the recording process was conducted. The instruments were done when the vocalist was not in the studio. He said that the band works better when he is not with them. Angels leaves a great variety of questions which might be given answers only after the release of the following album. We all hope that The Stokes will not make us wait another five years.