MICHAEL CUTHBERTSON
Arts Writer

After a five year hiatus, The Strokes are back on tour, showcasing material from their fantastic new album Angles.

After a few spins of this 35 minute LP, I’m convinced: No one can touch The Strokes’ knack for making rock albums that still speak to “the kids these days.” I dare say the Angles sound is a watershed moment in indie rock and something we can expect to hear mimicked.

To my knowledge, Angles is the first album to properly blend the aggression of rock with the spirit of dance music. Whether you dance to Angles or rock out to Angles is really your choice. The best example of this new sound is “Taken For a Fool,” a track that I must dub “an instant pop-rock classic.”

Here, treble-heavy guitars, beat-machine-like drums and fat bass all serve to bring rock music into the UNTZ-UNTZ-era of popular music. To be fair, The Strokes have been dancifying rock music since their debut album Is This It.  I’m fascinated by their mission: to make live analog music sound as digital and sampled as possible.

If all this offends the rock purist in you, check out “Gratisfaction,” an unabashed old time rock gem. It has echoes of Queen, featuring Brian May guitar tone and heavily layered vocal harmonies. “Under Cover of Darkness” is another track that offers an unadulterated rock sound. But if this still hasn’t blown the rock lover’s load, Albert Hammond Jr. sneaks in a couple shreds on “Two Kinds of Happiness” and “Metabolism.”

Mostly though, it is frontman Julian Casablancas who carries The Strokes. Personally, I’m hesitant about some of his vocals on Angles.  I’m probably in the minority but I don’t want Casablancas dabbling with rap or catchy indieness. It sounds silly, but I think Casablancas is more of a crooner than anything.

Any faults that do happen on Angles come when The Strokes leave the sweet atmosphere of Planet Rock.

“You’re So Right” tries a bit hard in sounding like the shit that spews from Honda subwoofers. Some songs also get lost in a sort of new-waviness that doesn’t jive with adjacent rock parts. I do, however, like “Life is Simple in the Moonlight,” which adds the synthy sounds of new wave to the more metronomic rhythms of olden day Strokes.

Overall, the greatest surprise on Angles is Fabrizio Moretti’s drumming. He seems to have done his homework, playing exactly what every tracks call for: rushing cymbals for dance tunes, compressing loops for electronica, driving beats for rock and so on. He’s also tight as hell, which is part of the reason he can be confused for a beat machine.

While I’m zealous about the ’60s sound, I do embrace The Strokes new direction. Sure, I’d prefer another garage rock masterpiece like Is This over the Angles sound, but that’s not realistic. Rock must evolve with the 21st century if it ever hopes to climb back into the charts. Otherwise, it will linger in the dank record stores and dive apartments of it’s greasy adherents.