The Strokes: A Palate Seasoned by Fame and Its Bitter Aftertaste

NY Times review by JON PARELES


The Strokes lose their cool on "First Impressions of Earth" (RCA), and three albums into their career, that's exactly what they needed to do. When their debut album, "Is This It," came out in 2001, the Strokes were hailed as the band that would clear away the sludge and clutter of 1990's rock and, as a bonus, return New York rock to the spotlight.

From the band's beginning, Julian Casablancas wrote music that polished a New York paradigm: terse, tautly intertwined two-guitar riffs that connect back via Television to the Velvet Underground. He sang lyrics that projected a quintessential New York attitude, with layers of jaded irony around a vulnerable heart. Sympathy for the city after 9/11 only made the Strokes seem more significant. But onstage, the Strokes could come across as too jaded: just standing there and running through the songs' impeccable mechanisms while Mr. Casablancas slouched nonchalantly over the microphone stand.

By 2003 the hype had moved on to other bands, and it didn't help that the Strokes' second album, "Room on Fire," felt like a rerun. Their crafty reticence was less intriguing a second time around. So the Strokes have something to prove again with this album, and they outdo themselves. "First Impressions of Earth" is their most openly impassioned album. As they lower their emotional guard, they redouble their musical ingenuity, then crank up their attack.

Disillusionment - with romance, with daily life - was always the Strokes' mindset, and that hasn't changed. In "Razorblade," Mr. Casablancas sings an alienated lover's inner monologue: "Oh no," he semicroons, "my feelings are more important than yours." Consciously or not, the tune echoes Barry Manilow's hit "Mandy," which only makes the putdown more biting.

But now the Strokes have something else to be disillusioned about: their recent past as a Next Big Thing. "I'm such a success," Mr. Casablancas intones in one song with bleary sarcasm. He writes with self-conscious candor about the experience of quasi fame - leading a band of internationally praised local heroes who still don't have a gold album in the United States - and the psychological whiplash of being extolled and then ignored (for being far too popular) by the hipster elite.

All the reactions to the weirdness of celebrity are on this album: arrogance, envy, paranoia, eagerness to please, writer's block, heavy drinking, loneliness. Mr. Casablancas doesn't spare himself, his inconstant fans or an indiscriminately ravenous music business. He's fully aware of his role as a fungible media commodity, just an entertainer. The video clip for "Juicebox," the first single from the album, shows the Strokes playing on a radio show with a disc jockey so glib and stupid he mangles the names of the band and the song.

Yet Mr. Casablancas also has more on his mind than his career. "Ize of the World" starts out sounding like a star's misgivings - "Watch what you say, 'cause they'll be trying to knock you down" - before his perspective suddenly widens: "Young adults to modernize/ Citizens to terrorize/ Generations to desensitize." With guitar tremolos pushing the tension higher and higher, the song ends abruptly after a final pair of "ize" rhymes: "Weapons to synchronize/ Cities to vaporize."

In "15 Minutes," Mr. Casablancas sings, "Today they'll talk about us and tomorrow they won't care." He's not griping, particularly; he's just coping with facts like a hardheaded New Yorker. In the meantime, the music builds pressure behind him, then explodes: switching from a deliberately paced waltz (despite some twitchy high-hat cymbal taps) to a galloping rocker that has Mr. Casablancas howling before it's over.

That's something new for the Strokes. "First Impressions of Earth" isn't exactly a screamo album, but it decisively uncaps the dynamics of the band's music. A bitter intensity used to break out now and then from Mr. Casablancas's usual Lou Reed deadpan, but the band used to contain it in music that refused to budge from its steady-state riffing. Not any more: on the new album, the band not only matches his outbursts but also eggs him on.

With the producer David Kahne taking over from the Strokes' previous producer, Gordon Raphael, the arrangements still replicate a five-man band crisply recorded in the studio. But everything sounds bigger, nervier and more spontaneous. Fab Moretti's drumming continues to keep time alongside Nikolai Fraiture's bass, but he also bats around unexpected accents; Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi neatly mesh their guitar parts, but there's also a spark of contention in the counterpoint.

The song structures are as meticulous as ever. Every section of a song, from intro to coda, gets a tensile new riff, often with the guitars and Mr. Casablancas's voice tugging in different directions; hook links up with hook. Yet the Strokes are clearly determined not to fall into self-imitation this time around. They push their vocabulary further afield, harking back to the B-52's and surf guitar in "Juicebox," latching on to Blue Oyster Cult's minor-key arpeggios and early Cure drumming in "Electricityscape," merging a glam-rock stomp and dizzying stereo guitar triplets in "Red Light."

In "Vision of Division," the beat for the intro comes from Motown and the scrabbling guitars come from postpunk; the verses hint at the dub reggae underpinnings of Public Image Ltd. and the rhythm-guitar touches of the Police, while an instrumental bridge makes the lead guitar sound like an oud. Yet every bit of their musical resourcefulness is swept up and subsumed in a song that could be about breaking away from a band, a label, a friend, a lover or all at once; "Why do I accept the things you say?" Mr. Casablancas rages, as much at himself as at his antagonist. "You know what to change, but not in what way." As the guitars and drums buffet him, there's no posing, no detachment, and absolutely no way to keep his cool. He, and the Strokes, are much better off without it.