The Strokes - 'Juicebox' (Rough Trade)
4/5
By: Alex Boekestyn
So, in four years, what have The Strokes done for us? If nothing else, they made leather jackets and wearing your guitar really, really high up on your body cool again, which is laudable enough. But, more crucially, they made guitars interesting again. So interesting in fact, that they've now gone full circle and are very
boring again; with every skinny white guy in Christendom seemingly able to twang along to a Television LP and get offered a record deal.
Time then to beef up, it seems, not only in body, but in sound as well. The louche, skinny-tie apathy of 'Is This It?' has now completely dissipated, replacing this season's must-have sound; a thick metal sheen, palm muted chugging, a thudding slap-bass intro and a chorus that's like the theme from 'The Blues Brothers' being flattened by an ice-cream truck. Fluff mags everywhere will surely proclaim, 'Gee whiz folks! It's the Crime Fiction Rock Revolution!' And the familiar thing binding it together though is Casablancas' trademark 'look at me/don't look at me' complex, sandwiched together in an awkward act of Freudian free association: 'Why won'cha come over here! / We've gotta city to love! / You're so cold! / YOU'RE SO COLD!'; Jules clearly scrabbling for his own sense of self amongst a thousand converse clones, lurching vox-wise between Lux Interior and Howlin' Pelle Almqvist.
Unlike The Hives, however, there's little chance to be the co-ordinated Dick Tracy outfits that would make this track really work live. Aside from the haircut changes and the feint, distant winding up of hype-grinders this track is likely to start, it has that thing which was very rare on 'Room On Fire'. A killer ascending/descending chorus. At least now we can add one new thing to the pile of stuff the New Yorkers have taught us; that the sound of the future is the same as the one from 20 years ago, tweaked for the lawyers and given a swanky new jacket. Imagine my surprise.
Artists in this article: The Strokes
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