It was sitting in the health food aisle, so it was an easy grab since there are no prescriptions needed. I stumbled on it a few years ago while I was doing some grocery shopping at Loblaws. I am not exaggerating at all when I say this tea is a God-send.Īs someone who has struggled with chronic insomnia for over a decade, you can take my word when I say this tea works like magic. Over-hyped and dangerously derivative, the Strokes nonetheless deliver the goods on 'Is This It.Traditional Medicinals Organic Nighty Night Tea. Who knows? Maybe next year the Strokes will even win the Grammy for best new artist. Which only makes it more of a shame that the band's reign as scene kings is over before it really began. The album is strong but also remarkably self-conscious, occasionally sounding like an idea cooked up at a record-playing loft party where, no doubt, the Strokes were the cool guys mixing drinks and talking music over by the turntable. do everything in their power to prevent that from happening. Well, almost - a qualifier that also applies to the uncharacteristically major-key pop of 'Someday.' Over a shuffling beat and a swarm of jangly guitars, Casablancas uncorks a melody worthy of Marshall Crenshaw and then gets all nostalgic about it: 'In many ways / They'll miss the good old days / Someday, someday.'īut how can we miss them if they won't go away? On 'Is This It' Casablancas and Co.

Then it becomes the perfect sound forever. 'Barely Legal' is also transcendently familiar, featuring a two-note guitar riff that's a major letdown until the guitarist starts moving it around the fret board. Meanwhile, his band serves up a guitar-splashed din of slow-motion skronk-and-roll that recalls both Lou Reed's drug-addled splendor and every song Pavement ever recorded. On the CD's languid title track, frontman and songwriter Julian Casablancas croons sweetly, if a bit cryptically, sounding as though he's singing a song you're sure you know through a transistor radio with a dying battery. Throughout 'Is This It,' the band lights on the most elemental kinds of progressions (see also 'the Feelies') and then proceeds to milk them for all they're worth.

Unlike the artsy punks in Television, though, the Strokes mostly stick to the basics with their guitars-bass-and-drums musical attack, frequently trimming the excesses of three-chord rock-and-roll simply by playing just two chords. The list of obvious influences should also include punk-era greats the Jam and, especially, the legendary Television, with whom the Strokes share an obsession with ringing upper-register riffs and plenty of East Village hipster credibility - at least for the time being. Psst - the Strokes sound like the Velvet Underground, pass it on.Īll of which happen to be true. Psst - the Strokes sound like the Fall, pass it on. Some have been trying, it's true, playing a musical game of telephone that's only accelerated the hype, word-of-mouth-style: Psst - the Strokes sound like Pavement, pass it on.

It's also pretty derivative, as any MP3-downloading music geek could have told you months ago. Which is really too bad - the album actually is pretty great. Now Rolling Stone is calling the album 'the stuff of which legends are made,' while the more modest Esquire opines merely that the disc is 'what all garage bands should struggle toward.' The way Time sees it, the band's melodies 'stay with you like tattoos.' Buzz, like speed, can kill, and a Mack truck of hyperbole has just slammed into the Strokes. music press conferred Next Big Thing status on the group. Just as the New York City band of early-twentysomethings releases its debut disc, 'Is This It,' the rock-and-roll hype machine shifts into overdrive.

Psst magic