Mind Gap

This just in from the Strokes website (well… actually, it was posted on March 27):

Work begins on album number four

While I’m certainly eager to hear this next album, I can’t help but feel a little anxious about it. Frankly, First Impressions wasn’t my cup of tea. Sure, they got lots of radio play with Juicebox… but come on, Juicebox? Really?

That said, I did like a number of tracks on the album. Evening Sun, Heart in a Cage, Electricityscape, You Only Live Once (plus the lo-fi version I’d Try Anything Once — in which Julian’s voice is back to what to should be: bedroom-radio-static). But what First Impressions lacked in comparison with the first two was the sense of an album as a whole. When you listen to Is This It, you start at Track 1, and you don’t stop until Track 11 is over. Rinse, and repeat.

Album 3 was a bit of a miss in that way. I found myself skipping tracks, or selecting a couple and listening to them exclusively. It didn’t have the draw of its wise young predecessors, and in attempt to incorporate variety, it lost a sense of cohesiveness. You forgot that this was a Strokes album.

Sometimes you just get things right the first time.