Highlights from Nikolai’s interview with Zane Lowe

its clear that not all the band wants to tour-otherwise we would have more info by now. a summer tour sounds nice but realistically the strokes will more then likely do exactly what they did with angles -wait to be offered a huge sum of money they cant refuse and then half-heartedly play a few festivals.

with the strokes “i think too much too fast” yes the band struggled at the beginning but they were almost immediately handed a contract after hitting overseas. the band never was able to experiment with their sound at an early stage which is why now they feel the need to branch out. comedown will be the last strokes album for a very long time so lets just enjoy it.

Thanks Matt!

thanks for uploading more clear

Can someone not scan the Q review? I would if i could lay my hands on a copy. Btw hope Áll the time is the worst tune on the album’, it really is one of the worst strokes tunes ever

I just noticed this in the Q table of contents: “The Strokes: breaking up is hard to do, but it’s easy to listen to, page 102.” Again: ugh.

#122 Well, I’m not a very religious person, and I’m not a girl neither, but yeah, I do know some stuff, so thanks! have no idea who you are, but I’m sure you’re very cool too.

@very metal: Why can’t your iPad do screen grabs? You should just be able to press the home button and the hold button to do a screen capture which would be automatically saved into your pictures.

Phew, ok, here you go:

Fall out boys
Julian’s gang stop squabbling long enough to make their best album since Is This It.

The strokes were so perfectly formed upon their arrival in 2001 that there was a sense that should they ever unravel, they’d never quite fit back together in the same way. Garage rock bands were two a penny for most of the naughties so it’s easy to forget just what a game changer they were, pulling the stool from underneath bands like Starsailor, Travis and Turin Brakes. To put it one way, no one had looked that great in a leather jacket in a long, long time.

But that was 11 years ago. When Q interviewed the band in 2011, just before the release of their fourth album Angles, their gang mentality had all but eroded. Once they were like blood brothers from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, but now they were barely speaking to each other. Valensi blamed Casablancas. Fraiture blamed Hammond Jr. Hammond Jr blamed the drugs. Casablancas blamed everyone. Nobody blamed themselves. The resulting album had one great moment–the melancholic crunch of lead single Under Cover of Darkness–but everything else about it felt half-baked and unfinished. It was as if the strokes forgotten how to be the strokes.

That identity crisis is what makes their fifth album tick. They sound like themselves–those taut, rhythmical jabs, stabs of guitar underpinning Julian’s dozily sighed vocals–but nothing like themselves at the same time. The shrill manga-pop of One Way Trigger is a perfect taster for the rest of the album. Just as that song had people wondering if the strokes had discovered A-ha, there’s and ’80s groove hip-swiveling its way right through the core of Comedown Machine. In their own dysfunctional way, the strokes sound like they’re having fun.

The glossy sheen is a world away from the no-fi recordings of their debut and its follow up room on fire, but comedown machine shares the concise nature of those early career watermarks. Tap Out is a dreamy, Gallic-influenced opener, with Casablancas’ airy vocal coda suggesting that the Human League might have had some airplay in between the A-ha records. Wonderfully odd influences pop up all over; the wordy hurdles of Welcome to Japan’s chorus appear to have been lifted directly fromTechnotronic’s Get Up (before the night is over).

Even when they up the pace, there’s a restraint that characterizes comedown machine, even in its sturdier rock moments. In that sense it feels like their least New York records to date; it’s a record of space and light, nothing rushed or boxed in.that approach is captured best in slow animals, muted guitars slowly building around casablancas’ whispered falsetto.

It’s impossible to know if the strokes are on safe ground as a band–at the time of going to press they were insisting that no interviews or photos would accompany their latest record– but perhaps shutting themselves off from the world has done them good. Comedown machine is their best album since they hit perfection with their debut. You’d lie to think they’re entering a new lease on life as a band. This being the strokes, it could just as well be their bittersweet sendoff. ****

@Very Metal: Thank you big time for transcribing the article! It has me feeling very excited for the album, except that damn last line “… it could just as well be their bittersweet sendoff”.

test