different strokes.

remember in 2001, when the strokes built the post-pop garage bandwagon for bands like the killers and franz ferdinand to hitch rides into the scene upon? remember when you first heard "last nite" and fucking loved it, but it's overly obvious radio-friendliness caused you to snub them in public, until eventually the guilty pleasure just spread like indie wildfire and the strokes became sort of endearing in that bad habit sort of way?

well, fast foward five years. it's the future and i'm officially sick of the strokes and the hundred other bands that sound just like the strokes. it's simple physics, folks. backwards motion tends to make people nauseous. and the strokes' third album is like a well-intended time warp gone awry, as it tries to whisk us back to a time that has barely passed us by. first impressions of the earth could only be excusable if it were actually created by inhabitants of another planet, truly alien to this redundant bullshit sound (which happens to abound in sickening amounts here on planet earth).

i admit that i was briefly shaken awake by the first single, "juicebox," and it's relentless serial-killer guitar riff. for a second, i was almost fooled into believing that maybe the strokes got a little bit bad ass! but then the bratty bastards slipped back to their boring basics, with fourteen tracks of bland music and repetitive fourth grade lyrics, like, "my feelings are more important than yours" and "i hate them all. i hate myself for hating them." i'm not even joking.

at least their website looks cool: http://www.thestrokes.com/index2.html