Third impressions Do the Strokes have anything left to say? BY WILL SPITZ
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"With new bands I always listen to the third album," says the Kinks’ Ray Davies in the January issue of Mojo, regarding his curiosity about how Franz Ferdinand will follow up their sophomore effort. "That’s the real key to know what’s going to happen." Generally speaking, Davies is right. Assuming we’re talking about a band that had some sort of success with their first two albums, the third may signal a desire to stick with what works or the inability to grow artistically. Other times, it marks a departure or an attempt at maturation — think the Clash’s London Calling or Radiohead’s OK Computer. Neither scenario is necessarily negative or positive, but, as Davies points out, you often can get a good idea of where a band are headed by listening to their junior-year joint.

So what’s up with the third effort from the Strokes? Well, before we get to that, here’s a quick refresher course: for the most part, the songs on their 2001 debut, Is This It (RCA), were brilliantly straightforward and unadorned — two or three chords and a primitive but catchy-as-hell guitar lead or two, with singer/songwriter Julian Casablancas dousing the whole thing in buckets of nonchalant cool. The album just about lived up to the heaps of hype, and the band were deified in the media as the saviors of rock and roll. So when it came time to record a follow-up, the pressure was immense.

In 2003, they went into the studio with Is This It producer Gordon Raphael and an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it kind of attitude, attempting to avoid the so-called sophomore slump by playing it safe and recording basically the same album a second time. No doubt there were some great moments on Room on Fire (RCA), but they were better the first time we heard them. There was a handful of deviations from the Is This It formula — the blue-eyed soul of "Under Control," for one — but not enough to prevent critics and fans from bemoaning the fact that this was it all over again.

You could say the same thing about the first two albums by another group of New Yorkers, a band who — more so than oft-cited Strokes predecessors Television and the Velvet Underground — are truly the Big Apple brethren of the Strokes: the Ramones. Their sound was so disarmingly simple that at first people thought it was ironic performance art, but it quickly became the blueprint for a new genre. Their homonymous debut and its follow-up, Leave Home, sounded like stripped-down, sped-up Beach Boys — familiar, yet totally fresh. Both albums were terrific but remarkably alike. So it was with the Strokes. (Except, of course, that Casablancas’s vague lyrics about isolation and ennui have never been as memorable as, say, "Beat on the Brat" or "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.")

But this is where the two bands’ histories diverge. The Ramones continued down the same path for Rocket to Russia and for pretty much the rest of their career. On First Impressions of Earth (RCA), which was released Tuesday, the Strokes sound like a band determined to shed the one-trick-pony tag.

For starters, the band opted not to record with Raphael and instead went with studio vet David Kahne, whose diverse credits include Sublime, Paul McCartney, and Sugar Ray. Kahne’s production is markedly slicker than Raphael’s: the drums don’t sound as though they were played on a Casio; the bass is fuller and heavier; and Kahne convinced Casablancas to allow his vocals to be scraped clean of their signature layer of cruddy distortion. Also, the previously understated guitar work of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. is supplanted by embellished melodies, fancy fretwork, and even a hyper-surf-rock breakdown at one point.

But perhaps the most important difference lies in Casablancas’s songwriting. The tunes are more harmonically complex, and embark on surprising stylistic and formal diversions — no previous Strokes song exceeded the four-minute mark, whereas more than a third of the 14 songs on First Impressions do.

The album opens almost identically to Room on Fire — a single guitar note proceeds steadily over a stuttering mid-tempo drum rhythm — and the song "You Only Live Once," with its simple hook and straight-ahead structure, is one of the most Strokes-ian of the lot. But don’t get too comfortable in Déjà Vu Land, because before you can say "redux," the album’s lead single, "Juicebox," kicks in with its "Peter Gunn"-on-steroids riff so bizarrely similar to the Henry Mancini TV-spy theme that it sounds as if the band might be kidding. On the other hand, the B section is as pretty as it is propulsive, but seems as though it’s part of another song.

Unfortunately, much of the rest of the album is similarly disjointed. The band are uncharacteristically exploratory, but they don’t always know how to navigate unfamiliar terrain. To borrow Casablancas’s own words, from "Vision of Division," they know what to change, but not in what way.

Throughout First Impressions, the band alternately get in their own way and wallow aimlessly in humdrum monotony. Heavy-metal guitar wankery taints the otherwise compelling "Heart in a Cage," which is driven by an energetic 6/8 rhythm and a keenly ominous bass riff. "On the Other Side" is a plodding, reggae-tinged tune that treads clumsily from minor to major keys. "Ask Me Anything" is the first Strokes song based on something other than guitars and drums — Casablancas sings over a lone Mellotron — but like a lot of the songs on the album, it comes off as uninspired, unexciting, and ultimately disappointing.

That’s not to say there’s nothing redeemable here. The mid-tempo "Razorblade" features a catchy guitar melody, which Casablancas’s vocals catch up with at the climax — an album high point. The song also finds Casablancas pilfering from an unlikely source: the chorus cops its melody directly from the Scott English/Richard Kerr–penned "Mandy," which was a Barry Manilow hit in 1975. Somehow it works. Another highlight is the anthemic new-wave-meets-hair-metal "Electricityscape" — think Duran Duran covering Starship with Tommy Lee on drums. As if to emphasize its un-Strokes-ness, Casablancas sings, "For now I think that I’ll just borrow all the chords from that song and all the words from that other song."

At least he’s not borrowing from his own songs again. And that’s just about the best thing that can be said about First Impressions. Sure, it has its memorable moments and a handful of great songs, but it’s by no means a great album, especially compared with the latest from the Strokes’ comrades in the retro-rock revival of the early part of the decade, the Hives and the White Stripes. The airtight, criminally underrated Tyrannosaurus Hives (Interscope) finds the supercilious Swedes refining their garage-punk craft to near perfection. On the other hand, guitar hero Jack White all but forgoes the electric six-string on his band’s new Get Behind Me Satan (V2), and the result is an eclectic artistic breakthrough. Maybe that’s what the Strokes had in mind for First Impressions. Unfortunately, the results sound like a band desperately trying to find their identity.

In his Ink Blot magazine review of Is This It, Jesse Fahnestock predicted the Strokes would either " ‘progress’ into capable musicians making boring music, or they’ll release another album that sounds like this one and we’ll laugh and wonder why we liked them in the first place." With Room on Fire, they did the latter; with First Impressions of Earth, they’ve done the former. So, will Is This It remain their definitive statement? On "Ask Me Anything," Casablancas sings about having nothing to sing about. "I’ve got nothing to say," he moans more than a dozen times in less than three minutes. Fortunately, his band’s third album is just promising enough to keep us holding our breath to see if he eventually finds his voice.