Day 82: Julian Casablancas – Phrazes For The Young

What? It’s only been 10 days.

Anyway, moving right past my glaring dereliction, I’ve now had a very adequate amount of time in which to listen to and contemplate this album (thought I said I was gonna move past — oh fuck it). I needed it.

I am still a fan of The Strokes, although I deliberately avoided listening to their First Impressions of Earth. Is This It won unquantifiable amounts of good will with a lot of people, and in the process cast a huge shadow over the musical industry and their own futures. How do you improve on that? How do you incorporate anything new into a band that succeeded so flawlessly on the basis of garage rock so authentic that you can still today smell grass shavings and leaked motor oil when you listen to it? How do you change without losing that spirit?

“Guys,” Julian Casablancas perhaps said, “What if our garage just has lasers in it now.” And so 12:51 was born. But despite the robosynth infusion, the music was formulaically identifiable. Julian Casablancas squirmed in his leather pants at band practice. He yearned for a world where he could wake up in the morning and not steel himself for another day of secrecy and shame; a world where he could take his phone off of silent and let his friends hear his rad ray-gun ringtones.

By 2009 The Strokes hadn’t done anything in a while, and the members busied themselves with solo albums, quirky “really, those two?” marriages, and otherwise quietly hibernating. Then out comes Casablancas with a real head-spinner of a single, “11th Dimension“.

Okay.

The cat’s out of the bag on the pet predilection of The Strokes’ chief songwriter: Mega-cheesy synths and drum machines yanked sniffling out of the 80s milieu.

So he likes The Cars. Cool. That doesn’t really matter. Some people (according to something I just read) said The Strokes sounded just like Television. No one came along in 2001 and invented swaggering garage rock. No reason they should be married to it. But they made the sound work so well at the time because they inhabited it flawlessly. I saw some live performance of theirs on MTV2 back when that album was going crazy — which, holy shit the internet blows my mind every single day, here it is — and their 70s style was so convincing, and so inscrutable, from the sets and stages they played on, to their clothes, to their hair, to the sounds and models of their instruments, that at the time I honestly thought it was some old band receiving a retrospective of sorts.

Flash forward to Phrazes, which after 400-some words I’ll come right out and say is a touch of a mess. Casablancas has shown an obvious nostalgia for bygone eras, and Phrazes seems like the culmination of everything he’s ever found cool, from clothes to literature to music. One viewing of the aforelinked “11th Dimension” video is all it takes to understand what’s wrong with this album. It’s dreadfully unfocused, and is one of the first albums I’ve heard that begs the term, which I’ve never actually heard applied to music, “design by committee.”

Those first three tracks suggest that the album will be a ton of fun. “Out of the Blue”, which if you can successfully not hear the lyrics clearly for your first several listens is a rollicking good song that exemplifies verse-chorus-verse songwriting, and “Left & Right in the Dark” and “11th Dimension” are also great, catchy tunes. It ends there, though, as the album’s b-side careens wildly into a morass of dour affectations, as Casablancas trades the poppy momentum he has for a long story-song about a historic New York avenue (from which I learned virtually nothing) and a few uninteresting synth-ballads. Songs go on forever, lost in their own tangles, with awkward organ and guitar solos butting in all over the place. There are great melodies and hooks here and there, as you’d expect from a musical genius like Casablancas, but they get swept away by a convolved undertow of unchecked ideas.

Overall? Not bad, necessarily, but it definitely feels like listening to someone’s experiment. I’ll be interested to see how this creative detour feeds into the upcoming Strokes album, Angles.