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Further Impressions of First Impressions...

I was hoping to kick off the new year with a veritable flurry of new posts, so as to keep me from falling into a slump of not updating this blog frequently enough... but as sometimes happens, life had other plans for me. I spent the last four days out of town for my grandmother's funeral and, needless to say, other things took priority over posts on a silly little blog that hardly anyone reads. It wasn't an unexpected passing, although it did come a bit more quickly than some of us might have expected. She will most definitely be missed and I'm very fortunate for having had her in my life. Towards getting back into the swing of things, the below is a post I had been kicking around early last week.

Every now and then I get the itch to spend a little time with those albums that seem to get lost in the shuffle of time and pile of new releases to get through. Those albums that may have stuck around for a little while after I first heard them, but didn't really stand up well enough to make it into more permanent rotation. These aren't bad albums, just the albums that weren't quite good enough for me to call up on a more frequent basis. The Strokes' third album, First Impressions of Earth, is definitely such a disc.

I remember being absurdly excited by the lead single "Juicebox" when it was tossed out on the internet late in 2005, spending time playing it over and over again on iTunes shortly after downloading. A couple days later the full album leak floated around, but I decided to shy away from it. I was excited about hearing the album and I wanted to kick it old school: ignoring the leak and getting my first taste on the day of physical release. Call me old fashioned, but I still like the idea of an "album" and anticipating its "release". Anyway... January 3rd came and I popped the disc in as soon as I got home from work. I liked the epic feel of the album before I even heard a note - the liner notes with different artwork for each song (reminded me of Soundgarden's Superunknown) and the idea of fourteen tracks was very nice. But I found the actual album itself to be a little overlong, a bit of a chore to sit through. It got off to a great start, but it was getting a little tedious towards the end. I remember classifying it as a "grower" after that first listen, hoping to dig in a little deeper on those tracks filling out the second half. Which I did, over the next couple of weeks and months. I certainly didn't overplay the album, but I gave myself plenty of chances to warm to it and I eventually did. I appreciated the attempts to stretch the band's signature sound and I could get behind the experiments that may have fallen a little short (namely, at the time, "Ask Me Anything"). I ended up ranking it my 49th favorite album of 2006, but I don't know that I pulled it out too often after that (certainly not as often as Is This It or Room On Fire anyway).

So here we are just over two years after its initial release, and it seemed like a good time to give the album another go-round. The verdict? Still a really solid album that more people (fans and non-fans alike) should give a fair shake to. "Juicebox", "Heart in a Cage", and "You Only Live Once" still stand up as pretty good to really good singles, but its some of the other album cuts that really made my revisit worthwhile. Most striking to me, this time around, was "Electricityscape". The song starts out as a typically taut Strokes song, what with the circular guitar riff and dominant drums. But the song starts to shift gears from there, faking you out with one pseudo-chorus and another before bringing in the song's first guitar solo. After that its another pseudo-verse and pseudo-chorus before the second guitar solo, culminating in an abrupt and untimely end. It certainly isn't a "Juicebox" or a "Last Nite" that reveals its charms right away, instead it coyly curls up next to you and flirts with you a little bit before bolting out the door just before the big payoff. Its a dirty, rotten trick but it certainly works. And really, dig Fab's drumming throughout the song. The underrated "Ize of the World" and "Evening Sun" also stand up really well upon reflection, and I think "On the Other Side" would have made a terrific fourth single if this album would have performed better than it did. But I still think the clunky lyrics completely sink "Ask Me Anything", absolutely a dud.

The end result? Still a really good album by a great band that people seem to be ditching left and right, (have you seen how many used copies of Is This It have been turning up lately?) and well worth the time it takes for another listen. I'm not sure if I would change its ranking in my year-end list from '06, maybe I'd end up bumping it up a few places, but #49 was about right - a solid release that didn't quite live up to expectations, but had enough highlights to keep me anxious for LP number four.

Check out a couple tracks and maybe give the album another chance yourself:
The Strokes - "Electricityscape"
The Strokes - "On the Other Side"