In the new dawn of electro we welcome back Julian Casablancas, the voice behind the best guitar songs of the opening decade of the 21st century. Without his fellow Strokes band-mates, he’s left to put his own sounds together and in Phrazes for the Young he’s written a short reiteration of his lyrical, musical and vocal might and while it doesn’t all shine there’s more than a few nuggets of gold to listen to.
Casablancas’ first solo project starts with classic Strokes sounds in the opening rhythm of Out of the Blue, but after a minute or so you start to suspect that there is actually something out of the blue about the album as electro tones begin to seep into the tune. It’s definitely not what you would have expected from the front-man that brought us Last Night and New York City Cops (not girls by the way, for anyone else that was as confused as us in the formative years of the noughties), but it does kind of work.
The seep becomes a wash with Left & Right in the Dark and then the wash becomes a flood in the 11th Dimension and you realise that all bets are off all of a sudden. While there’s still a part of us that’s annoyed we didn’t get the Is This It parallels we’d been hoping for, but there are some positives in the new direction Casablancas has taken on his first solo record.
The album’s first single, 11th Dimension, has placed Julian Casablancas as the Manhawke or La Stroke of the decade he inspired and you can’t help admiring him for coming back with something new. The best thing about the album though is that it brings back a voice that we all know and love to a radio cluttered with nowhere-nears.
Unfortunately, Phrazes for the Young doesn’t end as well as it opens and by the time you get to the final track, Tourist, you’re sort of back to square one; wishing for the return of The Strokes.
That said, having listened to the album a fair few times since our first review, it’s gone on to grow on us more, but not enough to retract the negatives. However, there’s one thing that won’t change; we’ll always want The Strokes to return with the same energy, cool and crash as they had when we saw them for the first time, headlining V Festival back in the glory days of 2005. The good news is that they did just that in 2009, which resulted in their fourth album Angles.
Julian Casablancas Phrazes for the Young review: 3.8/5
