Artist: The Strokes
Album: Is This It
File Under: Back in the day...
As cool as: finding cat poo under your bed 
Grade: 5
 
A lot has been made of the Strokes recently.  Pretty much every review I have read hails them as an inventive rock band who "just might save rock and roll".  Well, I just don't see it this way.  I'm not sure what part of Rock and Roll they are going to save, and I really don't care.  Plain and simple, I find this album to be so irritating that I would rather eat a raw chicken than listen to this album ever again.  I'm not saying that the Strokes won't hit it big, but as we all know, this has nothing to do with how good, or original, a band/music really is.
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To begin with, the music is, for the most part, extremely repetitive.  Anybody who plays guitar(or pretends to) will certainly pick up on a formula that the Strokes employ in every fucking song.  Downstroke, downstroke, downstroke....it just gets old after a while.  There are a few cool riffs, but nothing that really sticks.  The thing I hated the most about this album was it's overwhelming attempts to sound "seventies".  I know it's cool to act retro and all, but these fucking morons take it way too far.  Their singer filters his vocals through some sort of effect that make him sound like he smokes five packs of cigarettes a day, and makes the vocals sound as if they were recorded back in the lo-fi days.  This gets really fucking old, really fucking fast.  For the sake of an unbiased review, I listened to the whole album.  It was like being kicked in the balls over and over.  I think the Strokes need to be saved from themselves before they can even consider being the saviors of Rock and Roll.
 
Mr. Pickles...thinks that The Strokes must be stroking someone important to get all those good reviews...