[atlantaprog] Re: why prog faces an uphill battle

Just for contrast, here's a review that I wrote for Room On Fire that I've 
posted a few places:
In early April of 1966 The Beatles entered Abbey Road and began recording a 
track with the working title of "Mark One" for their as yet untitled new album. 
Just about four brisk months to the day later Revolver was released and is 
still regarded by many as the high water mark in the history of contemporary 
popular music. To look at the sea of magazine covers on which The Strokes are 
currently splashed and to read the over the top hype spewed by an oft near 
hysterical rock press, you'd think that Revolver's high water mark had finally 
been 
met and, yes, eclipsed after all these years. Unfortunately, their new album, 
Room On Fire, tells us a bit more about the sad state of disrepair into which 
modern rock music has fallen than it does about scaling the glorious heights 
that rock once inhabited. Times are tough indeed when this group is looked to 
for salvation.

The first thing I noticed about Room On Fire is that it's the tinniest, most 
thin and monophonic sounding CD I've heard since St. friggin' Anger. This 
thing could practically be an AM radio broadcast and suffer no appreciable 
decline 
in sonic detail. The second thing I noticed is that, even though the band, 
apparently, has a living, breathing drummer, all of the drum tracks sound like 
the cheapest drum machine off the rack from Guitar Center playing the sort of 
plodding "thud thud thud thud" beat, repeated ad nauseum for the whole of just 
about every track, that guitarists program as a rhythm loop when they just 
feel like practicing a bit or recording a demo on a 4-track. 

Cool ironic detachment might be one thing, but Julian Casablancas sings in 
such a flat and unemotional "five packs of cigarettes a day" monotone that 
you'd 
think that he's just so phenomenally bored to even be alive. As for the 
songs, the album is pretty much the same retread of Lou Reed, Television and 
Iggy 
Pop as their first album, except for the single, "12:51," which sounds very 
much like The Cars with colds. 

Oh, and it, apparently, took The Strokes over a year and a half just to pull 
this 33 minute (actually a few minutes*shorter* than Revolver) thing together. 
How sad is that? The room might be burning, but The Strokes are blowing soggy 
woodchips and newspaper at a campsite somewhere near the bottom of a mountain 
that they have neither the talent nor charisma to scale.

CH

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