While the lead singer of The Strokes has a good voice and writes great melodies, the band should be shot. My lord the guitar in Last Nite is ridiculous. Those quarter note rhythm shite is awful. Just awful. It becomes bubble gum.
Did anyone see the BBC documentary called Dancing in the Streets that was out about 5 years ago. It charted the course of rock n roll from the 50s to today (well, early 90s, anyway), and its episode on punk featured interviews with prominent punk artists saying exactly the same things the current crop of old-school garage bands could be saying - “we just want to go and make some noise” etc. One thing that particularly struck me was Iggy Pop (i think) saying that he just wanted to play the blues - but he knew that he was a white kid from Detroit, not an old black guy from the Mississippi delta. So all the 70’s bands, in trying to play like the blues artists of the 50s, created a fresh sound. Much like todays garage bands, in trying to play like the punk artists of the 70s, have created a fresh sound.
elfkin477: The Vines are great! I’ve got the album, and I can’t really pin them down to any particular band: songs like Get Free and Outtathaway sound Nirvana-ish, while Highly Evolved has that American 70s punk sound (ala Strokes). But just to confuse things, Mary Jane sounds all stoner psychedelia, Country Yard and Autumn Shade are Beatlesque pop and Factory sounds like The Clash in one of their ska moods. Maybe they really are fresher than the sum of their influences?
And I notice that WSLer has made another post rubbishing someone elses opinions. WSLer, you seem to be doing that in every thread I read lately.
My opinion:
The Hives and The Strokes are just polished rip-offs of true garage rock that has been around forever. Just buy any album that’s on the Estrus label (my favorite band is The Fall-Outs). Or better yet, check out The Mummies. They played their stages shows with only 45 watts of power from their amps. Sounds great. The Interpreters (from Philly) were really good, too.
I’m surprised to hear this style on the radio but hope that the bands that truly started it get some props.
Without turning this into a pit thread, I have noticed the same.
Dude. For the context and feel of the song, the whole POINT is quarter note rhythms. Any other rhythm and you have a completely different feel, and a completely different song. Those rhythms are why I like it. Sparse, stripped-down, back-to-basics.
Listen to the Beatles, listen to the Clash, they all do quarter note stuff from time to time. It doesn’t all have to be chugging eighths and sixteenth-note patters.
It drove me crazy when “Last Nite” was on the radio all the time. I would think, “Alright! ‘American Girl,’ I love this song!”
These bands are good for little pop songs, but not rock and roll as I know it anyway. Some of it is good listening, but the names bother me…The Strokes, The Doves, The Hives, The Vines…I like The Kinks myself.
I’m with the camp that thinks rock and roll never really needs saving, it just gets shoved into the spotlight every now and then. Hell, I’ve been saving rock and roll with my guitar and bass since I was ten! Give me a medal.
My band plays rock and roll, too, but I mean all types of rock and roll. We play punk, blues, hard rock, grunge, metal, and whatnot. I’m a little disillusioned right now because some bigwhig guy caught our gig the other night and told us that “we’d never make it big unless we chose a genre.” And I thought we were being versatile!
puly,
I have no problem with sparse and stripped down, nor the use of quarter note stuff in many songs. But IMHO, the lyrics and feel of the song need a more driving rhythm. Alternating bars of quarter notes with one starting with a triplet would match the feel on the song much better and still be sparse. It sounds like bubble gum to me. And that pentatonic solo is totally out of place.
Finally, someone else mentions the great rip-off, almost as bad as when that old Santana dude and that Everqueer group stole a Bruce Dickinson intro almost note for note. The first time i heard Last Night by The Strokes, i thought it was a live version of American Girl by Tom Petty & the HB until the verses kicked in. The problem with 3 chord rock is that thousands of musicians have done it before you, and better.
Ha! I bought The Strokes’ album, and dig it quite a bit, but let’s not fool ourselves. Lead singer Julian Casablancas is the son of modeling business guru John Casablancas, and wants very, very badly to be in Rolling Stone every other issue. The band is very much part of the New York hipster scene, and treads a fine line between credibility and parody.
They’re stylists, ripping off the New York sound of 30 years ago, but at least they do it relatively honestly. Let’s say they’re to New Wave what the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies were to Swing. They use a relatively obsolete style to make music they enjoy and that their audience likes. They aren’t breaking new ground, but they’re good at what they do.
As far as the “Last Nite”/“American Girl” thing . . . it really frosts my chaps. The intros to the songs are not in the same key, do not have the same drumbeat (not even close), and the guitars are not playing the same rhythms. The only similarities are that they both have drums and a guitar playing octaves.
I think I figured it out. I tuned into the middle of “get free” today, and thought it was STP for about 15 seconds, so they are probably who I was thinking of orginally.
I just heard “Last Nite” for the first time in a while today, and I gotta say, as dissimilar as the intros might be musically, they sound a lot alike to me. Granted, I have no background in hearing differences like that (and living with a grad student in music the last year of school taught me that there’s a lot of stuff I can’t differentiate on), but I’m probably closer to the average person listening to the songs than someone who can hear the difference.