The Strokes: Room on Fire

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * *)


On their 2001 debut This Is It, the Strokes were crowned kings of the New York underground - mostly by writers thousands of miles away but in love with the city's art-punk legend and legacy.

It was a take-notice record for many reasons. But the main one was its sheer sense of effort.

In an age of nu-metal behemoths or raging rock intellects, the Strokes scaled everything down into a scratchy wiry nervous tic of a sound. But that compression made for taut, infectiously anxious songs. They did tracks which said what they wanted to say, pal, then left with a swagger to their step.

Room on Fire isn't much different. Well, it's certainly no great leap from This Is It sound-wise, initial sessions with Radiohead/Beck producer Nigel Godrich having been abandoned and Gordon Raphael - on the board first time round - returning to turn the treble up and everything else down, once again.

But the playing is a little more adventurous, those NY influences are a little more worked through, and its 11 songs don't last much past half an hour, making it a shorter album than its markedly economical predecessor.

As frontman Julian Casablancas croaks his first lines on opener What Ever Happened, it also shows the Strokes' askew pop-knack as it shoves the chorus up front for instant fuzzy thrills.

From there it's a consistent shower of song-sparks. Among the brightest are Reptilia, its guitar fireworks earning them further comparisons to NY-rock ancestors Television. The synthesizer-adorned 12:51 is a two-minute 33 second 80s revival, while there are echoes of the era on the beatbox-powered big-drone of The Way It Is and the slow-fused The End Has No End.

Elsewhere, while You Talk Way Too Much and the jaunty Between Love and Hate reminds why they were embraced across the other side of the Atlantic first, saving their most Smiths-ish number for last on I Can't Win.

Most surprising of the lot is Under Control on which they deliver a soul tune, albeit a battered and bruised one which is equal parts Lou Reed/ Velvet Underground and Motown.

Throughout, Casablancas comes on amusingly cantankerous, a man who can't get no satisfaction with his lyrics suggesting a love life ranging from the adventurous to the disastrous. Combined with the rest of the quintet's twitchy attack here, Room on Fire emerges just as vital as the first.

But that said, there's not enough evidence to earn them "of genius" suffix. Perhaps next year's Big Day Out appearance will be the decider.

Label: RCA