Review of ‘Reality Awaits’, the new album by The Strokes
The seventh album of the strokes, “Reality Awaits”is not just another album, although their albums have rarely been that way. His debut, “Is This It”was hailed as rock’s latest twist, the last album to receive critical support while the genre remained the mainstream music of the time.
Since then there was a continuous album, but full of great songs, and several disappointments in a row until in the middle of the pandemic they released their comeback album with “The New Abnormal.” Produced, in addition, by an expert in comeback albums like Rick Rubin, which not only helped them to please the critics again but, much more importantly, reconnected them with a new generation and gave them back the public factor, with “The Adults Are Taliking” passing to “Last Nite” as their most popular song on Spotify.
Not content with this, if their first appearance led to the emergence of several bands influenced by them, such as The Libertines or the Arctic Monkeys saying that they only wanted to be one of the Strokes, now Geese, the new rock band that everyone is talking about, also seems to follow their path.
So the expectations for their next album were enormous, again with Rubin at the mixing table, and newspapers like the ‘Irish Times’ wondering if the band led by Julian Casablancas could save rock’n’roll (it’s not really known from what) and make the kids put their cell phones aside and believe in the genre again. But the Irish journalists had overlooked a very important thing, and that is that the two previews of the album, “Going Shopping” and “Falling Out of Love” They had taken it upon themselves to end all expectations and declare dead the ‘hype’ that had always surrounded the band.
In sites like Rate Your Music or Albumoftheyear the two previews of the album are rated as the two worst singles in the history of the album. Strokes. The second of them, “Falling Out of Love”as the worst song in its history… Its enormous sin, that Casablancas’s voice is heavily treated by the vocoder and autotune that he has used so much in his parallel project with The Voidz and in his magnificent collaboration with Daft Punk in “Instant Crush.”
So it seems clear that this album is going to receive very bad reviews because it is not good enough to overcome a narrative that has already been imposed, with two absolutely butchered previews and a delay in the release date that sounded like doubts within the group about their own work. There will be those who use that same narrative to say that this album is a masterpiece, that only he and a few initiates are capable of recognizing, but it is not that either.
The point is that “Reality Awaits” It’s not a horrible album, far from it. It’s not even the worst of the group’s discography. That place is still for “Comedown Machine”although, obviously, it is not at the level of the three best, which would be the first two and “The New Abnormal”. So in these times of tension, black or white, it is difficult to try to defend a good album that is not wonderful either. But let’s try it.
The boys from New York have accepted Casablancas’s order and, from minute one, they don’t make it easy. The album begins with “PsychoShit.” All a slow burner that increases in intensity and contains a lot, a lot of auto-tune; It has a darker tone than the songs of “The New Abnormal” and also shows that, in “Reality Awaits”, The songs have a much more diffuse construction than the songs on their previous album, as if they had emerged from ‘jams’ with the band. It is a start, to say the least, disturbing.
It is followed by the much more direct “Dine ‘N Dash” where he shows that his love for the Psychedelic Furs goes beyond putting in the chorus of “The Ghost in You” in “Eternal Summer.” In this song, with a bridge that is pure Strokes, there is a riff that takes you to the “Love My Way” and, if we take into account that here Casablancas does not use the hated auto-tune as much, it will be a song that is saved from the burning of the ‘haters’.
The riff that starts “Lonely In The Future” could make us think that “Falling Out Of Love” It was just a nightmare, but no. The guitars are treated to the maximum; Casablancas’s voice has that robotic touch and there is even a kind of piano house treatment. Don’t pay attention. It’s a great topic. Possibly the most direct on the album and the auto-tune works well when used. Of course, lyrically it is a kind of vindication of the band’s past that is tarnished when Casablancas throws a beef at the most famous music critic on the Internet: Anthony Fantano: “I heard that twenty fucking years ago, I did / Fantano word for word when I was a kid / Stick to the technical ’cause that’s great / But you wouldn’t recognize art in any age.” We must once again recognize that Casablancas is not the sharpest pencil in the box…
And then comes “Falling Out Of Love” or what turns out to be the most hated song in the history of the Strokes. An ode to auto-tune, in which the singer uses this resource to emphasize feelings of melancholy. I will have to be the unbearable one to break a spear in favor of this song, and repeat again what by now should be very clear: The vocoder, the autotune, are nothing but tools for musicians, in this case the singer who, like the guitarist, has 20 pedals, can also treat his voice as much as he wants since it is just another instrument. And if you don’t want treated voices, stop listening to singers who use microphones and amplifiers…
“Going To Babble On” continues along the same paths. Casablancas singing in a register different from his own, until he reaches the chorus and, although this time without hardly a trace of vocoder, it is the instrumentation that once again sounds processed and robotic. The guitars at the end sound more like Daft Punk “Discovery” (01) than to the Strokes. After this, “Going Shopping” It sounds quite effective, but it is not “Hard to Explain”but it’s not bad either.
Then it’s the turn of “Liar’s Remorse”. A song that may be the dullest song on the album and whose ending, with video game music, does seem like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge to the ‘haters’. But “The Fruits Of Conquest” sees them approach sexy R&B again with very good results, and also Hallelujah! (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), there’s a mini raw guitar solo. The second part takes them down other paths, until a synthesized keyboard comes in and the singer returns with a great falsetto.
The album ends with “Tyrants of the Mellow Moon” in which the guitars sound as fans expected, but in which Casabancas’ voice is once again passed through the vocoder. It is a great and heartfelt half-time with a dreamy finale that can disorient more than one person.
To summarize we could say that, deep down, this album is a kind of mix between “The New Abnormal” and The Voidz, with Casablancas often burying the band’s sound behind his treated voice. It’s not a new trick, nor is it groundbreaking, but it’s his trick. I don’t think it’s to get things out of hand and much less to affirm, as I’ve read somewhere, that “These types of releases are what make fans want to shoot the musicians of their favorite band”…My goodness!
Responding to the ‘Irish Times’ this is not going to make kids give up their cell phones, buy a guitar, a bass and a drum set and start a band. No one is going to sing that they just want to be a Stroke after hearing it. But, of course, this album is not an insult either, nor confirmation that rock or the Strokes themselves are dead. “Reality Awaits” Those who think that “Instant Crush” It is the best song signed by Casablancas since “Reptilia” and it will greatly irritate those who can’t handle vocoder and autotune. It is neither a step forward nor the fall of the Roman Empire, it is simply a good album without more… and without less.
