"The Room is on Fire as She's Fixing Her Hair

Like several thousand other white boys across North America, I picked up the latest Strokes album this week, after being thoroughly dejected and disappointed after finding out that the limited edition two-disc set of REM's "Best of..." release had been delayed a week. No REM fix for me for awhile, it would seem. I had planned on picking up the Strokes' Room on Fire anyway, but I was going to wait for a couple weeks until after I got my high fidelity jones out of the way first.

Now, after hearing the first single, "12:51", I was partially expecting something different. I knew that originally the Strokes had set out with this album being produced by Radiohead-producer, Nigel Goodrich, and despite that process being aborted, I was expecting something along the lines of the disparaty between Radiohead's Pablo Honey and The Bends. Instead of something different, we essentially get Is This It 2. Keep in mind, this isn't a bad thing.

This offering is a little more refined than the earlier disc, there's a larger "album" feel here than the last disc, but the overall sound and approach is still the same. The influences are still easy as hell to spot, with a blend of 60's and 70's rock with New Wave, so you'll see snippets of Hüsker Dü mixed with Iggy and the Stooges, some Peter Gabriel-era Genesis accompanied by the Cars clang. I suppose some people could make a game of it, deconstructing each song into their component parts of what strum came from which classic rock guitarist. I'd rather just listen to it at this point.

If I have any complaint at all, it's that -- due to the fact that the band focusses on getting to the heart of the song without any frills or extravagencies -- like Is This It, the album is too damn short, clocking in at just over half an hour.