I wanna be forgotten and I don't wanna be reminded

Continuing my trip back through the 2003 album charts.

26/10/03 : Room On Fire - The Strokes

Absolutely everyone agrees that The Strokes' debut album Is This It? is a masterpiece - except for me who was left thinking "is that it?". So obviously I'm expecting their difficult second album to be more of the same, or worse.

Yup - more of the same. None of it's horrible, but I just don't understand what they had that drove everyone so wild. There's some decent guitar work on it, but apart from that it's bang average and incredibly samey - I was quite reminded of Interpol's Antics, which admittedly came later, but is a whole lot more enjoyable. This just feels like another half-arsed effort (the only redeeming feature is that there's only 33 minutes of it) and so I remain mystified by the whole Strokes phenomenon. I'm really not convinced they put a load of effort into the album cover either.

We're at #2 in the charts this week with a new entry on the start of a perplexing 21 week run, with this being as high as it got. The rest of the top five were Dido, a Sheryl Crow best-of, Rod Stewart and Texas (both new entries) and the next highest new entry is also somewhat surprisingly Rod Stewart as part of a The Faces best-of (#13).

Wikipedia has more than I expected on the album but there's very little content in there - Radiohead's producer Nigel Godrich was involved in the early stages but it didn't work out, so Is This It's producer Gordon Raphael was the fallback option. The critics were surprisiingly nice about it, despite them mostly pointing out that it sounded pretty similar to its predecessor. And commercially it did way better than it deserved, getting to #1 in Ireland, #2 in Canada and #4 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" The Voidz, Interpol (Antics, no less), Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand. I do accept there is an argument that The Strokes encouraged others to find their indie-guitar sound, but I'm afraid this argument does nothing to convince me that The Strokes did what they did particularly well - my overriding suspicion is that they just made others think "I reckon I can do better than that".

19/10/03 - Doesn't hit the spot for me
02/11/03 - Pretty decent