out gig fliers to uninterested fans at Weezer shows; now, they are the subject of British magazine covers, schoolgirl crushes (assuming you know the right schoolgirls) and, already, disgruntled in-crowd jealousy.
The object of all this attention is a group of five young men of cosmopolitan, privileged upbringings - the oldest twenty-three, the youngest twenty - who have a pronounced fondness for kissing each other in public. (For them, the more comfortable you are with your masculinity, the more tongue you slip.) In the last two years, they have perfected their sound: a rhythmic snarl that draws on Seventies punk and New Wave but recalls nothing so much as a bunch of British mods - the Yardbirds or the Who, say - tearing through Chuck Berry and James Brown covers for the freedom and sense of possibility they found there and nowhere else. Their songs are twitchy tales of time spent chasing or running from New York girls, which is to say girls who are too smart, girls who take too much or too little of whatever's handy, girls who have everything you want and nothing you need.
So what does the best young rock band in America sound like? Frantic, for starters. The eleven songs on Is This It speed by in just slightly more than half an hour, each one so tightly constructed and urgently delivered that even the ballads seem fast. The Strokes are obsessed with rhythm, and at times their approach is more like that of a soul or funk band than a rock band: Each player, even the drummer, pushes at the melody from a different rhythmic angle until there are no more angles left to explore. Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi's interlocking, incessant rhythm-guitar parts free bassist Nikolai Fraiture to sweeten songs such as "Someday," "Last Nite" and the title track with graceful, Motown-like countermelodies. On "The Modern Age," Hammond Jr. and Valensi work things into a frenzy, doubling up on rhythm and stutter-stepping around the beat, then pushing the melody skyward in the chorus with ascending, circular chords until there's nowhere to go but further. A solo lifts off like a rocket, leaving a trail of distortion in its wake, then disappears into more guitar chatter. There's a gloss on the music that's scientific, cold, British, but underneath, things are distinctly passionate, American. The short, choppy guitar riffs and bottles-breaking-on-the-sidewalk drumbeats bring to mind the punk rock of New York and London, to be sure, but Is This It jumps along like punk as played by a boogie band; that is, a band in a mad rush
The title track off of the Strokes' debut is presented here as a rough sketch. Julian Casablancas' vocals are way up in the mix as a Casio-style keyboard kicks off the track; fuzzy bass completes the picture. Consider this a bit of a reminder of how the best songs are often the simplest.
