The Strokes ~ The Modern Age (EP) (album review) ... Jim Morrison meets Iggy Pop meets Lou Reed!

Style: alt rock, post-punk
Year: 2001
Label: Beggars Banquet
Home: New York City, New York

Members: Julian Casablancas ~ vocals
Nick Valensi, Albert Hammond Jr. ~ guitars
Nikolai Fraiture ~ bass
Fabrizio Moretti ~ drums

If I've heard the Strokes, I can't remember. I likely have in passing, but I've never given them much attention & they've obviously not stuck in my memory, or if I know a song by them I don't know that it is their song. Coming across their 3 song debut EP on youtube I decided to give them a listen. I was blown away by who the opening track, the title track, sounded like with the crack of the first notes. While the next 2 songs took me in 2 places I didn't see coming. Before I go farther, obviously I know nothing about this band beyond they exist & I believe are popular or were popular. Thus, what I say about this album might not come close to reflecting where their music & career went. This review becomes about first impressions & my interpretation as a listener. While I might be completely off track, & I welcome links in the comments putting me on track, I'm going to go on a limb & say the Strokes like classic rock based on my first impressions. I'm even going to say they were deliberately aiming for a classic rock sound with this debut release. I'm not referencing the lo-fi production quality, but the songs themselves. The title track is totally Lou Reed & the Velvet Underground! I'm a huge fan of everything Lou. I seriously can't believe these guys are just coincidentally sounding like the V.U., via their arrangement of just a few chords, steady drumbeat, muffled quasi-monotone vocals & lyrical phrasing & style. Let me explain. I find the only major difference between this first song & the V.U. post their debut album is the pacing. It sprints in a way the V.U. didn't even do on their upbeat pop album Loaded. Slow it down & throw in a little kick & this this would be the V.U.. I dare you to compare to see what I'm talking about! Even more so, the lyrical style of Lou at that point in his career is present, though it may be a bit unintentional on the Strokes' part. "Up on a hill is where we begin / This little story a long time ago" brings to mind Lou's "26 dollars in my hand / Up to Lexington, 125 / Feel sick & dirty, more dead than alive" from V.U.'s classic "Waiting For My Man". While "Let me go, oh darlin' let me, oh, g-g-g-g-g-g-g-go" echoes the repetition of Lou's lyrics in "Run, Run, Run" with "You gotta run, run, run, run, run / Take a drag or two / Run, run, run, run, run" or in "I Found A Reason" Lou's refrain is "Pa papa papa papa / Pa papa papa papa / Pa papa papa papa / Pa papa papa papa." This repetition isn't exclusive to Lou's writing, but its something that was prominent in his lyrics at that time he was in the V.U.. For the Strokes to sound musically like the V.U. & to have some lyrical similarities I find too coincidental to be just coincidence. Now, I'll confess, maybe nobody hears Lou in this other than me. I might be off in left field, though I think not. If anything, maybe the V.U. isn't a good or accurate comparison, but the Strokes are absolutely drawing on classic rock. I can't see how they're not. I believe this because of the song that follows which keeps the classic rock feel alive. "Last Nite" is less V.U. & a bit more glam. This is partly due to the singing, which now has the big voiced sound that seems to be floating across the beat like Jim Morrison in a druggy haze. Its also far too pop for the V.U., though the guitar solo is reminiscent of Lou's time in the 1980's with Blank Generation guitarist Robert Quine. If someone said this song came out of 1970's New York glam scene I wouldn't question it. The final track, "Barely Legal", turns the table again for a singing style that sounds like early solo Iggy Pop. Reckless, like Iggy, is how I describe the mood, but with a modern touch via the Killers. Its like The Modern Age gives us a slight tour of underground non-mainstream classic rock. That's at least how I hear it. Though, I'm the first to confess a 3 song EP is not the best way to discover a band as you don't get enough of them to hear who they really are. Maybe if I heard a dozen other songs I wouldn't think of the V.U. at all, or call them very contemporary in their sound. For all I know, my comparison to the past has done the Strokes a disservice, though I would hope being compared to Lou Reed they take as a compliment. If you disagree with my evaluation of how the Strokes have reached into the past & churned out a great modern interpretation, let me know in the comments. All 3 songs were re-recorded for their debut full length, which I obviously haven't heard. 

Lou Reed - Mistrial (album review) ... Should this album be given a mistrial or just declared guilty?

Style: rock
Label: RCA
Year: 1986
Home: New York City 

Members: Lou Reed ~ vocals/guitars
Fernando Saunders ~ bass/drum programming/rhythm guitar/keyboards/percussion/b. vocals

Additional: Eddie Martinez ~ rhythm guitar
Rick Bell ~ tenor saxophone
J.T. Lewis ~ drums/percussion
Sammy Merendino ~ percussion/drum programming
Jim Carroll, Ruben Blades ~ b. vocals

LR, recently departed & bless his soul, made it hard to be a LR fan. Being a Velvet Underground fan was easy, but his solo career had some amazing highs often out of balance with some experimental moments more about self-indulgence then great gutsy yet simple rock music & big city themed storytelling. While, let's be honest, he really couldn't sing nor play guitar, & the success of his wild 70's days were often the result of creative producers & too many drugs. But, what keeps us LR fans dedicated is put his tough to love leather voice into a pot with a touch of experimenting but not too much & his best poetry/lyrics & its some of the most powerful singer-songwriter music to be created in the rock field. The 70's were the defining days for his solo career, while the early 80's saw a sober LR taking up the guitar, reinventing himself as a tai chi practitioner & writing some great though not so gritty lyrics, while the 90's saw a balancing out & musical adventuring as the angst of youth fell away to be replaced by an elder statesman with a Edgar Allen Poe obsession. Some might say everything in his 70's days can be summarized with the classic Transformer while the later days climax with New York & maybe Ecstasy. Get those albums & you'll be doing good for starters, though far from doing anything but scratching the surface of the musical world of LR. Just be careful as you go forth as you'll quickly become a collector & fan & that's where the trouble starts as you start making random buys unintentionally just because it has LR's name on it. For many fans it's been hard to walk with him on his solo career which has put out too few great albums & too many odd ducks, Metal Machine Music & Lulu with Metallica not included. When LR is inspired its amazing, when he's off on some tangent it's self-indulgent, vague, overly introspective or not understandable by anyone but LR or all of the above. When he's trying to imitate music trends he never carries it off well. LR is great at being LR & not sounding like anyone else. When he lets himself be LR all is good, not always bearable, but certainly fascinating & unique, sometimes even making his artistic partner-in-crime-cum-widow Laurie Anderson seem normal in comparison. I've often wondered if she got envious of the strange misguided directions her spouse went? Mistrial is LR on one of the above described tangents & low point Lou. One reviewer called it worse than the headache making Metal Machine Music, Lulu having not been released yet, which is considered a low point in music in general & the litmus test of both bad & self-indulgent & unlistenable. This isn't that bad. This at least has coherent melody & rhythm lines. Lyrically though ... well, the earlier album is instrumental ... yet, those non-existent lyrics are not as shallow as what LR lays out here & the reason this album rates so low generally. It's all about the words on any LR album & this one aims low & hits its target square on. It's shallow with vague lyrics about throwaway topics, almost as if Lou was watching MTV wanting to be the popular Dire Straits. On the other hand, it features him on both lead & rhythm guitar for the first time, though he's really not a great guitar player with wandering unfocused cluttered lines that make it by their simplicity not their skill. Do the good guitars balance the bad lyrics? Not at all given how many songs are lyrically aiming for social hard hitting while the guitars are pop & lightweight. The best musical thing, which rescues many LR albums, is bassist Fernando Saunders who lasted longer with LR than any other musician & is often the musical backbone of many projects including co-producer. It's a shame he's not more of a well-known musician as his skills & experimenting are perfect for LR & way above average, or above what one might expect but then LR always had good taste in musicians. His textured playing is often the glue for a LR album. He gets bonus points here for trying to work with such weak material. But, no matter the efforts of its participants the album comes back to & falls apart at the lyrics. What was LR thinking? Where was he going? What was his message? What was he trying to say or comment upon? They aren't visual or introspective but meandering & pop rock wannabe throwaways & is that LR trying to tone down his writing or act cool for the masses? What has he said after the fact about this album to help us fans out with dealing with this mess? The title track is the best example with the first verse: "When I was six I had my first lady/When I was eight my first drink/When I was fourteen I was speeding in the street/What could anybody say to me." This might be the opening of a story, but its just a list with no point & doesn't make sense, driven home by the horrible chorus: "You can call me mister, you can call me sir/But don't you point your finger at me/I want a mistrial to clear my name/I want a mistrial in front of the people/I want a mistrial to clear my name/I want to bring my case to the people of New York City." Someone give LR a reward for creating a disaster. I once read an interview where Yngwie Malmsteen said that at some point a master musician doesn't need a producer's guiding hand. Usually when a musician says that they are at a point where they could use a producer more than ever. LR gives us proof. So many other songs have good ideas but are undeveloped, such as in "No Money Down" that fuses love & business iconography with "you're paying a price when there's no price to pay, lover's trust, no money down" sung with a David Bowie retro chorus. It's too weakly developed to be anything more than an interesting idea & a disaster of a listen. The album tends to move from throwaway social commentary (i.e. "Outside", "Video Violence", "The Original Wrapper") to upbeat love songs, when everyone knows that LR excels at torrid love songs (i.e. "I Remember You", "Don't Hurt A Woman", "Mama's Got A Lover", "Spit It Out"). "Tell It To Your Heart" might be the best love song on the album & in general best song, though minor in the LR catalog. He would come out in 1989 with New York blowing Mistrial away for good & in turn living up to its name. He'd actually go back to writing good lyrics versus stringing words together that sound good & making songs that don't.

Lou Reed ~ A Night With Lou Reed (DVD review) ... If you're not a Lou fan after watching this, than you won't be!

Style: hard rock
Label: Panorama
Year: 2000
Home: New York, New York

Concert location: The Bottom Line, New York, New York
Year Recorded: 1983
Length: 60 minutes
Bonus Features: none

Members: Lou Reed ~ vocals/guitar
Robert Quine ~ guitar
Fernando Saunders ~ bass
Fred Maher ~ drums

He's off drugs & maybe alcohol, too. He's got a new band with an amazing guitarist pulled over from underground punk legends Richard Hell & the Voidoids, an amazing bass player who would stay with him in the years to come & a drummer who had just the right sound with not too many flourishes. He just stands there in jeans & is anything but visually exciting or sexy as he was years earlier. He's also taken off the make-up. He's playing guitar after years away with his modest guitar skills fully in the spotlight showing what they truly are. He's got a set of songs including Velvet Underground classics & stuff from his stellar new album The Blue Mask which is a new & very personal mask for him to wear ... & Andy Warhol is in the audience. Are these ingredients for a classic rock show or a bomb? In this case it's probably one of Lou Reed's best live productions, not eclipsed until his revival of Berlin 2 decades later. This live concert begins a new story for Reed, one where he is reinventing & essentially rediscovering himself. On stage he's intimate & almost self-depreciating without being too interactive with the audience. He's more mature here, now sober, & sliding into his role as elder statesman of the punk generation which has already come & gone. He's still not fully comfortable with his guitar playing after a decade away & has yet to push his solos upfront as would soon be the case, thus what he plays may be technically unchallenging but it's raw, naïve & an experiment in just pure sound in a way only Reed can & would not do so again. Plus, he's got the amazing Robert Quine on guitar who was not just a diehard fan of the Velvet Underground & Reed but comes from the school of Jeff Beck guitar where the guitar sounds anything like a guitar. I became a fan of Quine's style after this as I'd never heard solos so ... cold & haunting ... and I've never heard anyone else even get close since. Sadly, The Blue Mask would also be his best outing with Reed of three albums before he'd contribute a box set of early Velvet Underground recordings & then commit suicide after the death of his wife ... remaining a true legend to all who know his playing. I should also confess that this video made me a bigger Lou Reed fan, too. One of the best parts comes at the end in a brief backstage clip when Reed talks about having one his his guitar notes reach all the way to the back wall of the space & then angularly bounce back. You completely believe that he heard this & want to go back and find it for yourself. Highly recommended as an introduction to Reed.

Lou Reed & Zeitkratzer ~ Metal Machine Music (live) (album review) ... When the worst album in history goes classical!

Style: experimental, classical, instrumental, tribute, drone
Label: Asphodel
Year: 2007
Home: Germany & California

Members: Lou Reed ~ electric guitar
Reinhold Friedl ~ piano
Burkhard Schlothauer ~ violin
Christian Messer ~ viola
Ulrich Maiß ~ cello
Alexander Frangenheim ~ contrabass
Ulrich Krieger ~ saxophones
Franz Hautzinger ~ trumpet
Melvyn Poore ~ tuba
Luca Vnitucci ~ accordion
Adam Weisman ~ percussion

There's albums of distorted feedback ... then there's the infamous Lou Reed hit-or-miss 1970's classic Metal Machine Music which brought feedback to a new level of pure un-listenability. All thanks to a couple of guitars positioned in front of amps to loop back & forth with the recordings later cut & spliced to form new disjointed sounds across four tracks of 15 minutes apiece. Whether it was done as a joke to end a recording contract or it really is Lou's secret masterpiece with hidden classical music excerpts, it's hard to tell with him & I'm a diehard fan, the general consensus is that if you can listen to the entire album without getting physically sick you're probably mentally deranged. It's also been often called one of the worst albums in rock music, albeit it's not really rock nor really music though its by a rock icon. But, if this legendary recording already wasn't strange enough the beast was brought back to life & given a facelift via this re-recording by a German symphonic ensemble, yes, symphonic as in classical symphony ensemble with not a bit of feedback or even any electric cords. The story goes that they asked Lou to perform the piece & he said it wasn't transcribed, let alone impossible to transcribe. They said they'd already done three parts. Considering how similar each part sounds on the original release it's always struck me as curious why they left out one movement. Once you've suffered through 45 minutes of it why not go all the way for the final 15?So, the result is this live recording with Lou guesting on electric guitar & includes a DVD for those that don't believe feedback can be transcribed & played on acoustic instruments. Though, honestly, it can't be. If this is a note per note recording the difference between a distorted guitar & a plucked viola make for almost a new recording while Lou's playing is his typical rambling solo far from the cocaine induced playing of decades ago. But, the idea is attractive to consider none the less while imagining that you're hearing the same recording decades later. Further, this is far from unlistenable. Actually, the DVD is quite enjoyable & even includes a post-show interview with Lou & probably more enjoyable than just the CD alone. If this was ever supposed to be a joke the punchline has been killed. This album may not be a rock album, though on some level it might be heavy metal, but Lou Reed's influence on the rock world is undeniable so for him to do something like this, or the Zeitkratzer orchestra to reinterpret his work, definitely makes it unique & interesting rock/metal worth sharing.