With the 2001 release of Is This It and their follow-up album, Room on Fire, the Strokes are indeed on fire. But the band's career was built by emulating the sound and style of proto-punk bands like Television and the Velvet Underground with an icy, stale accuracy.
Of course, everyone in rock steals from everyone else, so certainly the Strokes should not be faulted for this. After all, the entire genre was founded on the systematic raiding of blues songs by white teenagers.
Yet, the Strokes' particular form of musical appropriation is different in that the band adds nothing remarkably new or interesting to their pirated material. In short, everything the Strokes have ever recorded has been played better and with more accuracy by bands who have long since broken up and had reunion tours.
What's worse, the Strokes empty their predecessors' music of the energy and insistency it once held, sanding away the edges to make it more palatable for MTV2 airplay and Urban Outfitters' dressing rooms.
Is This It might have showcased the band's pandering unoriginality in full force, but it also contained a glimmer of hope, a promise that manifested itself on stand-out tracks like "New York City Cops" (UK version only) and "Trying Your Luck." These songs presage a future for the Strokes where they could move beyond the past and, in the very least, write a somewhat original pop song with what they had learned from their idols.
Room on Fire, sadly, does not live up to this promise. If anything, the Strokes lean even more heavily on the well-worn crutch of the 1970's underground music scene on their new album, this time spending money to make their album sound as if it was recorded on a shoestring budget. The band's attempts to update and diversify their sound are laughable: a synthesizer, some handclaps, and a drum machine on tracks like "12:51," "The End Has No End," and "The Way It Is" do little to hide what are otherwise standard Strokes songs.
In fact, the album's biggest problem is how standard all the songs actually are. Everything on Room fades together into a vague murk after a listen or two. Even superior tracks like "Reptilia" and the aforementioned "12:51" become indistinguishable next to pedestrian songs like "You Talk Way Too Much" and "Automatic Stop." By pushing everything into the realm of the merely unexceptional, the album's ubiquity of chugging guitars and sore-throat howls obliterate any chance at a memorable song.
Ironically, it's the Strokes' willingness to simply copy other bands that is hurting them the most. The deadpan vocal delivery and stiff guitar playing worked for the Velvet Underground and Television, but it does not succeed for the Strokes, as Room on Fire proves.
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