The Strokes - Angles

I still remember when The Strokes burst onto the music scene in 2000. Five young guys from New York who looked and sounded impossibly cool and, if you believed the hype, were single handedly resurrecting guitar rock. I don't know that I ever bought into the hype, but I certainly bought the album.

Eleven years later the band are delivering their fourth album. The five years since 2006's First Impressions Of Earth have seen solo releases from a number of the members, and when initial recording sessions for their return were abandoned it didn't look good. However they managed to regroup, and we finally have new material from the band to enjoy.

I don't know if it's a result of the time, or if it was just the only way they could be creative, but Angles is a departure. It seems they've reached the point in their relationship as a band where they have to try a few new tricks in the studio to keep things interesting. Games seems to be mining the same new wave gold that Cut Copy put to such good effect on their album. Call Me Back is an almost bossanova snapshot of a breakup. Gratisfaction has all the swagger of The Stranger era Billy Joel.But not all the new directions are this retro. Metabolism could be a Muse song, although the guitar solo is such a strong imitation of Queens Of The Stone Age I wouldn't be surprised to find out it was actually played by Josh Homme.

It's not all new tricks though. Even when The Strokes sound like somebody else, nobody else sounds like The Strokes. Musically they're tighter than ever, and the counterplay of the two guitars is frequently the work of sublime genius. The major drawcard though is Casablancas' vocals. He manages to compensate for his somewhat restricted melodic range with an impressive dynamic range and inflection. At one moment he sounds so laconic he could be heavily sedated, the next he's screaming.

Occasionally with an album I will reach a point that I refer to as 'synergy'. As soon as I get to the end of the album I need to start at the beginning. Every song (while I'm listening to it) is the best song on the album. I reached Synergy with Angles on Friday, and ran it on repeat all day. I'm not sure if this is praise for the album, or merely a trick of timing. I do know that when Casablancas screams for the first time 3:01 into Machu Picchu there's no chance of me listening to anything else for the next 31.3 minutes.