THE STROKES: ANGLES REVIEW

Did you like Julian Casablancas’s ’80s-inspired solo record, Phrazes For The Young? Then you’ll be really into Angles, right down to the discernible lack of real drum sounds for most of the album and a bunch of overbearing synths, which would drown the guitars if they weren’t so shiny. As much as Angles was supposedly a group project, with each member contributing equally, The Strokes has and always will be the Casablancas show. His voice, now even more prominent, is in your face all the time, which means it takes a bit longer to hear the band, like the subtly gorgeous riffing of Valensi and Hammond on ‘Life Is Simple In The Moonlight’.

What Angles is, really, is a mish-mash of Strokes past and present. There’s stuff that sounds a lot like Room On Fire (‘You’re So Right’), First Impressions Of Earth (‘Metabolism’ with it’s insistent 6/8 pulse is the first cousin of ‘Heart In A Cage’) and then a classic rock shuffle, ‘Gratisfaction’ that is pretty much as Billy Joel as they come. Unlike every other album in the quintet’s back catalogue, there’s no definitive theme or direction here, which may be a by-product of the recording sessions or the group generally not liking each other. Some of these songs will end up sitting very nicely as part of a Strokes greatest hits catalogue when they next decide to tour the world and make sacks full of cash; notably ‘Macchu Pichu’, and ‘Games’, which utilises icy keyboards as an opening for a brilliantly elastic groove.

Those people hankering for the snappy guitar grit of the long-beloved Strokes’ debut will not find much they can identify with here -‘Taken For A Fool’ is about as close as it gets- but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Rather than selling out Kings Of Leon-style, the band are moving tangentially at a point in their career when they can sell out Madison Square Garden without any theatrics or discernible anthems that characterises their contemporaries. With time this record will probably transform into a grower the way Room On Fire did, or perhaps it’s the first chapter in a new series of what we can expect from the group. Either way, they ain’t dead yet.

By Jonno Seidler