Boy, the Strokes' legacy outran them fast. Their debut Is This It has been tossed into the "Museum Piece or Transcendent Art?" vat sooner after its release than any other album in my lifetime. Which category it falls under isn't so much the issue ? even bona fide "classics" have elements of both the dated and the immortal ? rather how the sledgehammer that was their cultural influence was so instantaneous and pervasive that only a few years after they appeared somethingawful misanthropist "Dr." David Thorpe would declare them the year's "band that sounds most like a Karaoke version of itself." Say what you will about how you hear Is This It now, but the fact is they are probably the most influential revivalist group of this decade and at this point anything they put out will inevitably feel disquieting and a little banal. Ever hear people talk about how Brian Wilson's Smile would be hailed as the greatest album ever if only it had come out in the 1960s as originally planned? Gives me the chills. The point is that people take everything the Strokes did for granted, and therefore even if First Impressions of Earth ended up being an improved version of Is This It, the album would set off subconscious "anachronism alarms."

That I and many others are not interested in evaluating the potential "influence" of albums could have worked to the Strokes' advantage this time around. Their sophomore release Room on Fire was a genuinely strong followup that, despite showing only a little sound expansion in two culture-crammed years, seemed to verify the uniformity of their songwriting prowess. Critics who liked it significantly less than Is This It, I'll just come out and say it, we're not rising above petty societal tidal waves and ripples as they should have been. The exact same critical flaw led to the hyperbole of the band?s debut. Contrary to (still, amazingly) popular belief, it wasn't the Strokes' music that provoked love-it-or-hate-it sentiments, it was the idea of the Strokes, the prospect of what the album would do to indie rock in forthcoming years. And glossy magazines like the New Musical Express were right, to be sure. I don't know if we can directly attribute the existence of the Killers, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party and Interpol (naming the most well known) to that of the Strokes, but such various offshoots of minimalist punk and new wave certainly became old hat within a year or two, and still they come. It's nonsensical that some publications could still insist that it was the album itself that polarized the music community; what reasonable person wasn't grabbed by the cyclic, melodic garage of Is This It, yet what intelligent person could help letting the album title's infamous (and overgagged) three words pass through his mind? I picked up First Impressions of Earth because I assumed negative reactions were just an extension of the antagonism with which Room on Fire was met, but frankly this album doesn't just suffer from being out of place. Yes, it establishes some well-earned ambiguity about the future of the group. Still, I can't imagine even diehard Strokes fans calling it a successful album.

First and foremost, take a good look at the length of the album. Fourteen tracks and over fifty minutes is an ambitious temporal step for a band that had formerly recorded about seventy minutes' worth of songs. If it sounds like a selling point, "bang for your buck" or whatnot, think again. The album basically starts out promising with a handful of solid tracks and proceeds to taper off over the whole damn stretch, with occasional blips of interest. Anyone who has inadvertently memorized their first two albums and can sing along without thinking knows that the Strokes are best at making morsels of glee: delectable and over before you know it. If anything, First Impressions is the opposite. Even the catchy tunes ? which are there, don?t get me wrong ? have an uncomfortable, burdensome feel. Just an hour after I was telling a friend that the vocal part of "Juicebox" seemed a bit slapped together, I had it running through my head. Such is the case with several of the songs. More than ever it's the prevailing attitude that sticks with the listener after the album ends, so it's really a question of specific mood preferences. The now-sober Julian Casablancas continues his trajectory into, how to put this delicately, caring about his life more. On Is This It his lyrics conveyed swollen-headed boredom ("I turned 'round/Baby, don?t care no more/I know this for sure/I?m walking out that door") but on Room on Fire he showed a little more desperation in his indifference, insisting that he "Never needed anybody/I never needed nobody." First Impressions completes the transition from apathetic to pathetic with tearjerkers like "I?ve got nothing to say/I?ve got nothing to give/I?ve got nothing to say/got no reason to live." The lyrics are only occasionally obtrusive enough to be irritating, but when Casablancas tries his drawl at emotional, stretched out tunes he is inescapably out of its element.

Some have said that such uneasy facets are not for wont of hooks as much as the Strokes' attempts to broaden their horizons. Maybe so, but if Casablancas really was anything like Lou Reed (a common perception I've often disputed) he'd have broad songwriting skills that apply to a variety of genres. After all, we don't pretend every stylistically inert band that borrowed from one aspect of the Velvet Underground is actually reviving them. This album demonstrates awkward, almost adolescent musical growth, the slight exploration and reach of which simply highlight their own self-induced limitations. The interspersed musical techniques tremble but don't squirm, and thus the album lacks the edge that their earlier work achieved by defiantly orchestrating every song near-identically. The backing musicians do their best to enhance the more mediocre songs with crisply executed solos and fills, but even the songs that step outside the Strokes' comfort zone have such narrow individual boundaries that such diddles seem forced instead of natural. Not that the Strokes can't recognize their own successes and failures; in the handful of layered variations within each song they hit you with the classiest first and defer the discomfited. Accordingly, if you aren't satisfied at the beginning you probably won?t be for the next three minutes. It's a little upsetting that comparative ambition could lead to so many more dead ends, but Casablancas is just that much more aware of and concerned for his audience than Lou Reed, which is ultimately why he can never be as defiant as he might like.

Alright, I downplay the significance of the gems for the sake of argument. A handful of songs are as worthy as any on their previous albums. Like I said, I'm just a little bemused about using a bigger box to send fewer items. Inconsistency isn't really being discouraged nowadays, and thus First Impressions of Earth is a typically unnecessary "album" in the age of the iPod. Indifferent about 2/3rds of the songs? Delete them. Many fans will be fine with this. Now, I can't purport that their first two were real album lover's albums, but they were certainly gapless and thus ran through so smoothly that it would be a crime to chop them up. Meanwhile, this album is unfulfillingly devoid of euphoric little anthems, and as an advocate of the album format I can recognize it as an unsteady step in an unknown direction ? perhaps towards a whole new identity ? but not the delightful little safety net that I hoped they?d churn out.