Is This It
by The Strokes

This is rock à la mode at its finest - or should I say sorriest?

This music is irritating and detached as opposed to engaging and relatable for myriad of reasons.

Firstly, annoying mechanical, monotone, dry, soulless "modern" soundscape.

This is the quintessential hipster sound that we are all now so unfortunately and irrevocably familiar with. Luckily, no country as of yet enforces you to listen to bland music and I can only hope that I'm long gone (yes, dead) when that finally happens.

Also, I don't know whether to laugh or cry when the singer's effort is reduced to running his vocals through a distortion box in order to sound more rock-n-roll. Throughout the whole damn album!

Honestly, what gives!? I mean most rock singers can't sing worth dick shit yet that never stopped anyone from singing his or her ass off if s/he truly wanted to go out there and do her/his thing.

So, what's Julian's excuse? That he could actually sing beautifully but the audience must not be aware of such a fact because...? Is this the big secret and a no-no? Is This It?

Secondly, songs themselves come out as monotonic and seem supremely derivative.

I fail to find a trace of originality here. Where are all the hooks? Where are the dynamics to begin with? I mean what the f*ck, this is supposed to be rock-n-roll, not one note sermon!

And if you can only come up with cliched rock 101 grade guitar solos, then you might as well consider stuffing them entirely. Or at the very least work around such obvious limitations by applying the age old method (that Kurt Cobain happened to perfect in his short career): just bash the damn thing!

It'll make some noise what ever you do and that's all you really need anyways. When in doubt always try to focus in on the shit that truly matters. Which is to try to come up with killer songs as opposed to half-assed guitar solos that no one in their right mind should even pay much attention to in a rock concert.

For me it seems so painstakingly obvious that while these guys have no doubt heard some rock music at some point in their lives, they never really listened to it. Could it be that they failed to pay attention because they were too busy trying to get the image right first?

Thirdly, lyrics are superficial and reveal pretty well that these guys aren't like you and me but folks who most likely got heightened egos as a birthing right (thanks to privileged family backgrounds).

I can't honestly imagine these guys ever having toured in a shitty van that's running more on vapor than gas, playing in tiny shitty venues to hostile natives - if anybody at all - for weeks on end while begging for scraps of food - and lukewarm beer and casual sex - and still soldiering on because to them nothing is sweeter than getting to play your music to anyone willing to listen.

It's a lifestyle choice that people who love playing music tend to do even when they don't really have to. Let's face it: there are folks who have natural rock attitude and then there are those who don't mind playing it cool but who in reality will piss in their pants when shit starts hitting the fan.

You see, hipsters' best friends are and always will be other hipsters who tend to feel their pain most acutely (whatever it happens to be that particular week).

I'm sure the guys in The Strokes are all semi-decent or even lovely people but they are not rockers by a long shot (yes, I can tell it just by listening to this one record).

I for one tend to associate rock attitude to folks like Axl, Anselmo and Mustaine - just to name a few. Those characters lived, breathed and pissed rock, whether they were making it or not making it. They didn't just put on a this week's rock suit when they climbed on that stage no matter the size of it.

When those guys performed you instantly knew that they were at the top of their game and not one bit afraid to show it too. When you saw those bands play folks didn't have to cross their hands in front of their chests and ponder for a moment or two whether they liked what they were hearing or not - which seems to be the case with hipsters these days.

You knew it right away, then and there, and you either left or stayed. But you didn't stay and look stupid standing in the middle of the crowd pretending like you kinda sorta dig it out of fear that some of your peers might think that you have a poor taste.

I urge all you hipsters out there: please do everyone a huge favor by staying home and not _bothering_ to showing up at gigs at all. The audience will thank you and so will the band. Everybody wins including you.


To cap, this record is instantly forgettable and more importantly entirely unnecessary venture that adds nothing new to the table. Well... except making it that much more harder for disillusioned kids to decipher rock from music that merely poses as a rock music.

The fact that I find Stones and their middle-class notion of rock-n-roll almost bearable when compared to The Strokes' upper middle-class one, speaks volumes since there are few bands I love to hate more than the almighty Stones. Yup, this really is _that_ bad of a waste of everyone's time.

Ugh, I have spoken.

From drivebytornado 02/25/2013 22:49 | #66118 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

This album was hyped as bringing back rock n roll. I don't know that it ever left, but it certainly was an extremely influential album, as the number of "The" bands skyrocketed after this one hit. Equal credit must also be extended to The White Stripes, for sure.

This has been on regular rotation ever since I got it in early 2002, blasting tracks like "Someday" "Last Night" and "Soma" at high volume.

This is a an album I've seen very divisive views on.

When an album is presented as "one of the best," listeners often look for awesome new ideas or some sort of grandeur in that album. I think a lot of people listen to this album, don't hear either of those things, and pass it off as overrated or trendy garbage.

However, this album's strong suit is not in those areas as much as it is in its pitch-perfect mood and overall consistency & quality. It's a very balanced, rock-solid album that has just the right amount of every element. It's not an album to listen to a few times, appreciate its new ideas or best bits, and move on from; it's an album to listen to many times over many years, over which its freshness and appeal will only grow.

100% fantastically simple and brilliantly written guitar rock. What more could you want?

I’ve hesitated to review this until now. Like most of my favorite albums, this one had to grow on me, for 18 years to be exact. I felt like it lacked the immediacy of most great rock albums, that it needed more hooks and stronger payoffs instead of ending abruptly on certain songs. I remember reading an article about some industry executives who felt ‘Is This It’ should have been an even bigger album, that the songs never reached the heights of their potential. They used the template from the songs here and helped co-write ‘Since You Been Gone’ by Kelly Clarkson, demonstrating what they felt was the direction The Strokes songs were building to, but with bigger hooks. And I tended to agree with that sentiment for a long time, that these songs were good but never built up to a large payoff. Until one day, I was driving my old truck (as opposed to a newer Bluetooth enabled company vehicle) where I had no Spotify, no streaming service to speak of, just my old CD binder and the music of my youth. I was reminded of being in my friend’s basement, smoking weed and riding skateboards with our high school buddies, listening to The Strokes and desperately wanting to ‘get’ them the way they did. But it still didn’t click. It was good, yes, but that was all. It was historically important, I never argued that. But I never loved it. Fast forward a few weeks, and the album stayed in my CD player. I only drive that old truck on weekends, and somewhere along the way I misplaced the binder. So I have a choice: listen to this, the only album in my CD player, or the radio. I continued playing this album. And over time, I noticed my son nodding along to the songs, asking me each time he got in my truck who we were listening to, and commenting that they sound like The Beatles (he’s 3, he gets a pass). And in these moments, in a shared a experience, the songs started revealing themselves to me. I appreciated that the songs didn’t contain soaring choruses (with the exception of the perfect ‘Hard to Explain’) and instead relied on actual songwriting and musicianship to establish its brilliance. With all due respect to the poster below me, I feel it’s one of those rare albums that is anachronistic without being derivative. It could have been recorded in 1970 or today, and would have found an audience any time in between. It took me much longer than most to understand this album, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate it a little more for that reason.

97/100