The Strokes are back, and if this was 2006, that would be some of the most exciting music news of the year.
However, it's no longer 2006, and a lot has changed for the band in the last 20 years.
Mediocre albums, solo outings, long hiatuses all ended up causing The Strokes to lose some of their wonder. The band that made Is This It and Room on Fire has evolved into ... something else.
So, how does Reality Awaits hold up?
In all honesty, the band's seventh album is weird and not necessarily in a good way. The biggest elephant in the room is Julian Casablancas' vocals. The majority of the songs here are contaminated with AutoTune/vocoder that take an otherwise well-put-together piece of music and took me completely out of it. Casablancas comes off like he wrote lyrics for his other band The Voidz and went in to work with The Strokes, not caring that the bands are different entities.
Casablancas sounds uninspired and unmotivated on many of the tracks here. There is one moment, however, where he enters into a territory that I had never heard from him. On "The Fruits of Conquest," he bounces between a crooner and a soul singer, which is honestly kind of interesting. He's hitting octaves and notes I've never heard from him before, and it sounds like he's having fun. I wish there would have been more vocal/lyrical content like this track on the record as a whole.
As far as the music goes on Reality Awaits, the band does a good job of trying new things, and for the most part succeeds, musically. It's the strange combination of the new sounds and Casablancas' off-putting AutoTune that tarnish the songs. Album closer, "Tyrants of the Mellow Moon," is sonically a good song, but when Casablancas comes in, the vocals kill that vibe. Album opener, "Psycho Sh*t," is the same story. I've never heard The Strokes sound this way; the music could work as the soundtrack to a Castlevania game, and the guitar solo at the end is inspired. But the vocals take away from all of it, yet again. It left me wishing there were two versions of these songs, one AutoTuned, one not.
"Dine N'Dash" is The Strokes entering into Joy Division/The Cure territory. Interesting track and probably one of my favorites on an album filled with a lot of headscratchers.
Another mentionable song is "Going to Babble On." To me, this sounded the most like The Strokes. It has some unique ideas happening and reminded me why I liked this band. The guitar work from Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi is very impressive, especially in the last 30 seconds, where it sounds like they enter into a guitar shred off. A highlight of Reality Awaits.
When the record ends, it's hard not to remember what came before it. It's crazy that this is the same band that made Is This It and Room on Fire. I'm all for musicians evolving and trying new things — it's led to some of the best albums of all time. But it seems like The Strokes didn't fully flesh this one out.
