Big, immortal songs that wrote indie history and their sidekicks – packed with a slightly ambivalent collector’s item / cash cow feeling as a less pretty scam: The Strokes re-release with The Singles – Volume One more or less the, of course!, singles from their first three studio albums.
Of course, we don’t need to discuss the quality of the music itself here: Is This It (2001) is an instant classic that has lost none of its momentum to this day; the successor Room on Fire (2003) hardly weaker, only less legendary; and the ambitious third work First Impressions of Earth (2005) can only be accused of being a little too long.
A reunion with the eight singles of the records, which have been almost tirelessly on rotation for about two decades – Hard to Explain, Last Nite, Someday, 12:51, Reptilia, The End Has No End, Juicebox, Heart in A Cage and You Only Live Once – is in this respect a fine thing without glorifying nostalgia: they are all hits, through and through.
There are also ten B-sides, all of which were convincing then and now: When it Started is loveable Television-Pop with brightly communicating strings, the one on the American version of Is This It only as a substitute for New York City Cops served, and later also for Spider-Man was in use; the home demos too Alone, Together (without a rocking train but outlaw solo) and the short sketch Is This It (whose rhythm section pumps muddy in the background, while the guitar also acts more exuberantly, and yet everything sounds more unfocused, dozing and washed-out than on the precisely tidy later studio version), where too The Way it Is a not really neatly recorded fragment remains for chroniclers.
That which lets itself drift cute Modern Girls & Old Fashion Men seamlessly assimilates Regina Spektor into the band sound of the time, meanwhile Hawaii shows quite formidably as a brisk mood maker and I’ll Try Anything Once („You Only Live Once“ demo) (reduced to Casablancas on vocals and Valensi on e-piano) represents a simply wonderfully melancholic-romantic reverie as a secret highlight.
The live cover of the The Clash-Number Clampdown just as convincing as the soulful, softly grooving Marvin Gaye nod Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) (with Eddie Vedder as vocal partner and Josh Homme as additional drummer), but also leads to the minor and major blemishes of this physically quite expensive box: the interpretation of the Ramones-piece Life’s a Gas Missing, for example, unfortunately also (which is less serious) all the live recordings that appeared on the singles at the time – as well as, understandably, the single that was released exclusively for the fan club in 2004 Elephant Song.
For this there is to start with (the striking an den White Stripes trained) The Modern Age and Last Nite seemingly randomly selected two out of three numbers of the rawer sounding ones Modern Age EP for Rough Trade, which started the hype surrounding strokes at the time.
The rather slavish to the new format, which is kept one song per 7″ side (with one exception), cuts The Singles so (rather absurdly) in its richness and for completists is such a frustrating proposition between an incomplete B-side compilation and the first part of a greatest hits collection. But just: the content itself is world class!
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