Is This It? Not Quite.

Number 8

'Is This It' by The Strokes

Trotter’s Top Ten position : 1 in 2001

UK Chart high : 2 in 2001

This is the album that changed everything!  That's not strictly true, I've just always wanted to start a review with that sentence.  'Is This It' probably did change an awful lot though in terms of the music scene - particuarly in the UK where it was all getting a bit tired and predictable, guitar bands being fairly out of fashion following Oasis' decline and the overabundance of all those laddish, boorish rock acts.  From over the pond then, we started hearing about this brilliant back-to-basics New York garage-rock band with killer tunes, bags of attitude and style by the tousled-haired bucketload.  Yes, they were fantastically hyped by our press, but I think we were all wanting desperately to have a band that we deeply cared for again - and here they were, perfectly packaged for us to clamour over.  Also US bands, and those from New York in particular, always have that added advantage of seemingly being doused in rockstardust to us Brits; moreso than say if Julian and the lads had hailed from Coventry (and that is probably the only time I'll ever compare The Enemy to The Strokes!).  I fell in love with this album when I first heard it.  I think I'd been expecting the band to be a bit hard to 'get' after reading a few reviews about vocal stylings and overplaying their garage sound.  What you are presented with instead is a bunch of incredibly catchy indie-rock classics that burst on the scene, race along with such energy and confidence and then stop before they have time to get repetitive, every chord and beat economical and precise.  There are also a few other reasons this record means so much and still stands out ten years later (nine if I'd written this Top Fifty when I should have).  It's a debut doing what great debuts should do, bursting with fresh, exciting sounds and promising so much; it has a classic referential cover which middle America were appalled by; it has a grammatically incorrect title (punk rock in my book!); the singles were incredible and album tracks only ever so slightly less so (apart from the beautiful 'Trying Your Luck' which one day I want to learn to play on the guitar), it made going to see a live rock band exciting again, it influenced about half the bands on this countdown and they simply say 'Thank You' in the liner notes.  Yes, there was the usual carping once they became massive about their credentials.  But so what if they were bright, privileged poshos - were we saying that rock music had to be made by the poor and/or stupid to be any good?  Nope.  Perhaps the only thing that has taken the shine off 'Is This It' is the band itself.  Even now there's a term called 'the Strokes effect' where a band emerges so fully-realised and perfect that there isn't really anywhere else for them to go subsequently.  Don't get me wrong, the follow-ups haven't been bad at all, but they've certainly been working on diminishing returns since 2001.  They still remain top on my list of 'favourite bands I've yet to see live' though, so if anyone gets any tickets, preferably in NYC...

Look at Someday ; Hard to Explain ; Last Nite ; The Modern Age
Listen to a sampling of the Top Fifty on Spotify as we go or the 'one from each album' version