There are great musical achievements that stand the test of time. There are bands who are just fucking cool. And there are bands who catch fire out of nowhere before capturing the attention of the entire world. It’s not often those traits intersect so perfectly that the Venn Diagram ends up looking like a circle. The Strokes debut album Is This It is one those rare moments in history where not only do the twain meet, they collide perfectly together.
Julian Casablancas (vocals), Albert Hammond Jr. (guitar), Nick Valensi (guitar), Nikolai Fraiture (bass), and Fabrizio Moretti (drums) defined what New York City cool looked like. Leather jackets, shaggy haircuts, skinny jeans, vintage t-shirts, cigarettes hanging from their lips, a detached smoldering effortlessness that oozed from every single one of their pores. I’m 36 years old now and well past romanticizing what could have been, but I’ll be damned if there isn’t a part of me that feels like being in The Strokes in that era in my early 20’s wouldn’t have been the goddamn coolest thing ever. There’s only a short handful of bands in history that fit this bill. The Strokes are by far the most appealing of the bunch.
Alongside The White Stripes they ushered in the garage rock craze that began in the early aughts, creating a sort of vortex that sounded vintage and brand new all at the same time. As Casablancas famously said, they wanted the album to sound like “a band from the past that took a time trip into the future to make their record”, and by and large, they succeeded in that effort. The band studied and incorporated classical music motifs in their compositions, creating an amalgam of sounds that sounded like a universe which existed almost entirely unto itself.
A large part of that sound can be found in the recording process the band undertook during the process. In a word, this thing was purposefully lo-fi. Production was purposefully scaled back and leveraged just a handful of studio effects, while the mics placed near each instrument were simple in nature and focused on capturing the “bleed” of other mics in the room during the mixing process. This approach was all made possible due to the band’s maniacal commitment to recording everything in one single take in order to capture as close to a live sound as possible. The band rehearsed for nearly six weeks ahead of these recording sessions, perfecting the 11 songs until they became almost second nature. And in the steady hands of no-frills producer Gordon Raphael the rest was history.
Standout Songs: “The Modern Age”, “Soma”, “Someday”, “Last Nite”, “Trying Your Luck”, “Take It Or Leave It”
