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Album Review: The Strokes - Comedown Machine
Indie | Wednesday 27th March 2013 | Charles
The Strokes have always lived and will always live in the shadow of This Is It, it’s a sad but inevitable fact. Sure Room on Fire has some great tracks, but First Impressions of Earth was unmemorable and Angles poorly received (but I actually liked it). Not many bands make an important, genre defining album as the Strokes’ debut was and with the general expectation of their career hitting a downward spiral any new record is going to be viewed with scepticism.
It doesn’t help then that the bands’ first track to drop from fourth effort Comedown Machine, One Way Trigger, was such a bizarre mixture of falsetto, synths and a-ha that most either were left confused or automatically dismissed it. Then there was All The Time a much more typical Strokes track which left many questions on how the finished album would sound. In the end it’s somewhere in between, with definitely a rock core but more electronic than even Angles was.
In the end though the results don’t stray far from what you expect, catchy beats and fantastic instrumentation in a tight bind of a core New York sound. The band sounds older than ever, lacking the energy of early efforts and taking more and more inspiration from their childhoods in the 80s. Something about recent Strokes albums has left them just not very memorable or exciting and sadly Comedown Machine is no different but it’s one of those records that just consistently good and for that reasons it’s hard to not recommend if your desperate for new rock album (but maybe check PEACE out first?)
By Charles Pegg
