The Strokes - Is This It
I can't say enough about this album. I heard that when The Stooges came out everyone thought they were retro garage band not realising they were pointing the way forward to punk. Every song on Is This It is amazing. I played 'Modern Age' for my daughter the other day, and just for that song alone it could be one of the greatest albums. I was there for the making of the record and I was so blown away by their dedication to making this perfect music and executing it perfectly every night. It was crazy. These guys would really yell at each other if they missed one chord or beat. They were perfectionists. They were the first band of my age group who were great. There's a level of precision that The Strokes brought to making their music and their approach to it – the way Fab tried to emulate a drum machine in his playing – it feels obvious to people now but it was counter-intuitive at the time, no one had done that. Everything about Is This It was a statement in the opposite direction to what everyone else was doing. Before this the trend was for people make albums that sounded like they were performed in arena, they're soaked with reverb, Is This It is this weird insular record with the distorted vocals. People were confused by the decisions that were made when it was made when it came out, but now you hear it copied infinitely. It's funny that for a band that were criticised for being retro they've now come to define their own times.