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***1/2 The Strokes

THE MODERN AGE

(Beggars Banquet)

On the basis of little more than this wonderfully brief and immediately enthralling three-song EP (originally released by Rough Trade in England), New York City’s the Strokes were in record time deemed the great new indie hope, blurbed in Rolling Stone, and signed to RCA all before they could release anything at home (indie or otherwise), or tour, or become anything more than a buzzword signifying a potential commodity. It’s a mystery what, other than the hysteria of hype, has given RCA the idea that these guys can sell records, but on the up side, when the band’s full-length debut comes out in the fall, the label will at least have something worth buying.

The Modern Age’s opening title track is responsible for the Strokes’ reputation as Velvet Underground revivalists, though that’s mostly the doing of the singer, whose stuttering swagger and frenetic cheap-mike-through-a-bad-PA bursts of bad juju nail Lou Reed’s swoon of bleary-eyed excess. What’s better than mere impersonation is the way his voice works: it grabs you by the lapel and shakes the decorum from your bowels. (In person he looks like an exclusive-prep-school hustler’s wet dream: bored to tears, reeking of entitlement and leisure, another of NYC’s angelic gutterboys.) The second song, “Last Nite,” assumes the bouncy, jangly, spring-in-your-step, cigarette-in-hand quality of Iggy’s “Lust for Life”: it’s a compulsively joyous song for manic-depressives. On the last and poppiest cut, “Barely Legal,” he seduces an underage girl, steals her car (so she’s not too underage, right?), and drawls, in his best Iggy slur, “I just want to mis-a-behave/I just wanna be your slave.” Probably be your dog, too, if you asked.

— Carly Carioli