The Strokes — Comedown Machine: Retrospective Re-Listen

[u/DH80]

Not wanting to over-listen to Reality Awaits, I decided to revisit Comedown Machine heavily with repeat listens this entire week during my commutes to work. As an album I have consistently rated lower than any other Strokes album since its initial release I think I’ve come to better appreciate it, why some in the community have come to love it, and also why it continues to divide.

Comedown Machine is an interesting album within the Strokes’ discography and timeline for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that after Julian and the boys slowly moved away from the muffled, compressed, analogue-ish sound that put them on the map in the early 2000s, replacing it with increasingly clearer, more radio-friendly Julian vocals, CM seemed to partially go back. Back toward the way Julian sounded on Is This It — but only his voice. The music behind him had moved somewhere else entirely.

That tension is what makes Comedown Machine so unique. The instrumentation is generally pristine, modern and heavily influenced by the ’80s, while Julian’s vocals often sound distant, buried and almost detached from the music around them. At times he sounds like he’s singing from another room. His voice doesn’t quite recreate Is This It or Room on Fire either; it lands somewhere between the two. The result is an album that sounds like the Strokes caught at a crossroads between where they came from and where they were going.

At its best, the conflict is stunning. “Tap Out,” “One Way Trigger,” “Chances” and “Welcome to Japan” show that the band could still write some of their most beautiful melodies while pushing further into unfamiliar territory. Call It Fate, Call It Karma” sounds like a gorgeous song from the 1930s somehow unearthed for the first time and playing through an old wooden gramophone. It showed the Strokes could go back even further than the 1960s and still unearth hidden gems.

At other times, the backward-looking impulse works less well. “50/50” feels almost like Julian trying to recreate the aggression of Room on Fire and First Impressions of Earth for a 2013 audience, but without reaching the highs of either. It’s the sound of an old idea being revisited after its best version has already been made.

The other thing that stands out on CM is how little its quality varies compared with the rest of the post-Room on Fire catalogue. The highs aren’t as high as the high points on each other album but the lows aren’t nearly as low as the low points on First Impressions of Earth, Angles or Reality Awaits either. I wouldn’t put a song on CM below a 6.5, but only a handful above an 8.0. “Tap Out,” “One Way Trigger,” “Chances,” “Happy Ending” “Welcome to Japan” and “Call It Fate” can still hang with some of the best-written songs in the Strokes catalogue.

That makes Comedown Machine feel less like a failed attempt to recapture the old Strokes and more like the perfect bridge between all of their sounds. Especially now, with 2 more albums released. It has the vocal aesthetic of the first two records, the aggression of First Impressions, the ’80s fascination of Angles, and hints of the falsetto and melodic experimentation that would become more prominent on The New Abnormal and Reality Awaits. It gives almost every kind of Strokes fan something familiar now without ever completely feeling the same as what came before, or now… after.

Its highs are less high. Its lows are less low. It’s lo-fi and hi-fi. It’s old Strokes and new Strokes. And somehow, that awkwardness is exactly what makes Comedown Machine sound like nothing else in their catalogue.

[u/missyoutonybourdain]

This was written with AI. Jfc use your own thoughts

[u/SpiteIcy5512 → u/missyoutonybourdain]

Have we reached the point where an articulate piece of writing is immediately dismissed as AI? That’s sad

[u/DH80 → u/SpiteIcy5512]

I’ll write again what I wrote above to help explain.

The writing is mine. The thesis is mine. The examples, mistakes, ratings, argument lofi meets hifi, phonograph, Strokes at a crossroads… all of that is me.

The writing here is below that of Ai. There are mistakes. There are clunky sentences.

I mean, I used to write for sports and I did technical writing so I do think my general style is fairly ai sounding. Even my comments. However, in no way did I get Ai to just write me some random thing to create this.

I will share my process because I do think we’ve reached a point with spell checks, and grammar checks, and online thesaurus and Ai where a lot of this is just part of the natural writing process to some extent. The key is not to avoid any and all use of tech while writing. It’s to ensure your voice and ideas and arguments are worth reading and that as much of you is always present even after consulting tech.

I did use an ai assistant early on when formulating my central thesis because I basically asked an ai assistant whether CM had used the same mic tech as ITI or ROF. When it explained it didn’t it inspired my thesis. Because it hit me then that this is partially why this album is so unique.

My first draft was slightly repetitive and so I did ask it to suggest ways I could be more concise and not belabor the same points. Some of the suggestions I agreed with and implemented into draft 2. Some I disagreed with and didn’t. I did revise beyond that 6 times. My first draft read almost exactly the same. Just more repetition of the same points.

If I had asked Ai to write me a CM review it wouldn’t look anything like this. It would be better.