It’s a Wonderful Life of Albums: Room on Fire
Most sports fans are familiar with the term, “sophomore slump” to describe a player who excelled in their rookie season only to have numbers dip in the second. The Strokes were one of the most hyped bands of my lifetime after their iconic debut album Is This It? The electric guitar was back, rock music wasn’t dead, New York City is alive again amongst other hyperbole. The 2003 follow up Room on Fire keeps the formula of guitar utopia combined with Julian Casablanca’s reverse reverb vocals and just enough sleaze to make you feel alive.
It is difficult to describe, “Reptilia” without using the word guitargasm, because that’s what it is. Axe men Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr provide perhaps the quintessential example of band’s sound, and the song was featured on both the Rock Band and Guitar Hero video game franchises. With over 600 million streams on Spotify, it is among their most popular and the pace of it is that of blissful loss of control, “I said, ‘Please don’t slow me down, if I’m going too fast. You’re in a strange part of our town.’”
The first single for the album, “12:51” will enter your ears and render your mind awash with youthful balm. The guitar hook is a lovably catchy bit of joy that mimics the vocals about the prospects of going out on Friday night after a lonely streak. The song is two and a half minutes of bliss, “We’d go and get forties, then we’ll go to some party, oh really, your folks are away now? Alright, I’m coming, I’ll be right there.” The song belongs on a playlist for a bad day, as it is sure to cheer up even the most jaded among us.
A documentary was made about the 2000s New York City music scene led by The Strokes, borrowing the title from one of this albums’ best tracks, “Meet Me in the Bathroom.” When you were a rock band with the edge The Strokes had, you almost needed a song about a bathroom hookup with a line this good, “We were just two friends in lust, and baby, that just don’t mean much. You trained me not to love, after you showed me what it was.” The lucid reflectiveness of that lyric will ring out for decades, long after the amplifiers are still.
If this album represents a sophomore slump, then my ears must be broken. Other highlights on the record include the opener, “What Ever Happened?” as well as single, “The End Has No End” but you can’t really can’t go wrong with any of them. If you loved the first effort from the band you are almost certain to enjoy this one. While it may not have the clout of the debut album, I come back to this one whenever I’m in a mood for upbeat guitar music by a great band. Sometimes there is no substitute for the youthful exuberance of the early albums of The Strokes, no matter your age.
It’s a Wonderful Life of Albums: Is This It?
Rock and Roll debauchery has always held its appeal to me, when the cool band of the moment does something outrageous. Noel Gallagher once said, “Until you’ve actually thrown a television set out of a window, you don’t even know the sense of joy it brings.” The Strokes, led by stylish frontman Julian Casablancas were that cool, on edge band for me in the early 2000s. I have no accounting for hotel structural damage that they caused back then, but I always thought they might unleash that destruction at any moment.
The debut album Is This It was already on the hype train when it came out in 2001 on the heels of the success of their EP The Modern Age, which was released in the United Kingdom the same year. The first single from the album was, “Hard to Explain” rose to number 1 on the UK indie charts. This was our first introduction to the guitar heavy sound of The Strokes with the reverse reverb on Casablancas’ vocals, a defining sound of the early oughts.
In the vein of rock and roll mythology, good artists copy, great artists steal. With that in mind there was a definite and later blessed theft involved with the making of the single, “Last Nite.” The rhythm guitar intro is almost a direct lift from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’,“American Girl” something the band would later admit to in an interview that Petty himself referenced. Like a true crusader for the love of rock and roll, Petty never sued or was in any way negative about them lifting the intro, he laughed it off like the legend he is.
The easiest listening song on the album is probably the third single, “Someday” with its jangling guitars and somewhat hopeful lyrics, “You say you want to stay by my side, darling your head’s not right, ah, see, alone we stand, together we fall apart, yeah, I think I’ll be alright.” The music video was fun, featuring the band in a bar telling stories, sharing cigarettes and drinks, it would be rock and roll caricature if it didn’t look so natural and cool.
The Strokes were going to be the band that saved rock and roll in 2001, and their debut album Is This It? was going to be the blueprint. That kind of hype was something no band could ever live up to, but at least we got this masterpiece. If nothing else it shows the enduring power of rock and roll to have a record like this come out decades after the prime era of the genre. The energy of the record is also undeniable, and it clocks in at around 37 minutes, just enough time to make a memory tonight that will be hard to explain.
It’s a Wonderful Life of Albums: Get Born
Some would call it selling out, but I think it’s a pretty good sign if Apple calls and says we want to use your song to promote the music device that defined a generation. Australian rock outfit Jet’s debut album Get Born features so many great songs that if you weren’t there for it you might ask which one they used. “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” is so upbeat and energetic, it’s as if they intentionally made the song to accent the black outline of a person dancing with an iPod to it.
The tambourine and bass intro that set the stage for the delectable main riff on, “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” set the oughts on fire. It doesn’t require any sort of preparation, or greater thought process, it’s binary: Are you a human being or not? If you are, this song causes involuntary body movement in people. “So one, two, three take my hand and come with me, because you look so fine that I really wanna make you mine.” What else do you need?
There simply wasn’t a more fun song in the summer of 2004 than, “Cold Hard Bitch.” Back in the waning days of call-in requests to radio stations, there was a litany of hilarious dedications to ex-girlfriends and ex-wives. Often the DJ would egg them on until they let out a deeply satisfied, “She was a cold hard bitch.” The guitar on this track hooks you from the jump, and leads you down a road of playful misogyny, “Gonna take her home cause she’s over romancin’, don’t wanna hold hands and talk about our little plans alright.”
If you need respite from the rock for a moment you’ll find it with the breather ballad, “Look What You’ve Done.” It opens to a sad piano lamenting, “Take my photo off the wall if it just don’t sing for you, ‘cause all that’s left has gone away and there’s nothing there for you to prove.” In this song we see the versatility of the band and it provides some soothing mellow tones to an otherwise energy filled romp.
The album spawned five singles and sold over four million copies, it has something for everyone. The band enjoys a break from chasing tail and takes aim at the disc jockey on, “Rollover D.J.” “I wanna move but it don’t feel right, ‘cause you been playing other people’s songs all night.” “Radio Song” also offers a nice relaxed album track for you to fall in love with, this album uses all 48 minutes to the fullest. To not love this album, you would have to be some kinda cold, hard…Well nevermind.
It’s a Wonderful Life of Albums: Continuum
John Mayer was a polarizing figure before he broke Taylor Swift’s heart, frankly for a period of time he was a ladykiller who also played guitar. Thankfully for me, the guitar part was doing all the heavy lifting. His first two albums Room for Squares and Heavier Things were wildly successful albums in their own right, but it was clear John wanted to step out of the shadow of being the guy who wrote, “Your Body is a Wonderland.”
Continuum was golden era John Mayer, coming off the heels of his John Mayer Trio project with legends Pino Palladino and Steve Jordan, he was in peak form. This is 2006, three years after Bush declared, “Mission Accomplished” and well after the honeymoon period of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. “Waiting On the World to Change” is about as close to a protest song as a pop artist will get, and it’s fantastic, “Now if we had the power, to bring our neighbors home from war, they would have never missed a Christmas, no more ribbons on the door.”
Elaborating upon this disgruntled feeling, “Belief” echos a similar sentiment, and who could forget the Islamophobia that ran through the country like vodka through an Alpha Kappa bro: “We’re never gonna win the world, we’re never gonna stop the war, we’re never gonna beat this if belief is what we’re fighting for.” It’s not all gloom from the oughts, there is also blues, “Gravity” and “Vultures” are fantastic songs written during his time with the Trio. In addition, there is a completely respectable cover of Jimi Hendrix’, “Bold as Love.”
The song that hit the hardest on this album with its’ weeping lead guitar is, “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room.” John really gets after the solo on this slowly ending tragedy of a relationship: “I’ll make the most of all the sadness, you’ll be a bitch because you can, you try to hit me just to hurt me, so you leave me feeling dirty, ‘cause you can’t understand.” This is John Mayer’s best work, on his best album. It shows how much he can squeeze out of a Fender Stratocaster, and really makes you forget the bubblegum pop stuff, as good as it is.
If you wrote off John Mayer twenty years ago as fluff for the tabloids, you would be wrong, but it was easy to get that impression. I could tell you it sold five million copies in a post Napster world, but that’s just a number. I could tell you there’s another side of John, and he explores it here, but that’s subjective. What I will tell you is that this album is his best work in the studio, and stop this train, I wanna get off and listen to this album again.
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