Julian Casablancas — Phrazes For The Young

With no new Strokes album in sight yet, the band's members have been busy working on their own projects. Oh, sure, they've been getting together to write, but singer Julian Casablancas recently said the band were in "disagreement" over whether the songs were ready.

So one can't help but wonder if Casablancas' Phrazes For The Young debut solo album is his vision of how the next Strokes album should sound, or if the as-yet-untitled fourth disc will end up being very sonically similar.

Phrazes Of The Young sounds very much like the next step for The Strokes. Part of that comes from Casablancas being the band's principal songwriter, and part of it comes from the fact that it picks up where First Impressions Of Earth left off — except its songs are much, much better.

Opener "Out Of The Blue" has chugging guitar riffs that would make Casablancas' involvement with The Strokes painfully obvious even to the most ignorant of listeners, but its keyboards point to a weirdo retro '80s obsession he hasn't really shown us yet.

"Left & Right In The Dark" is in the same vein, and its guitar sounds like it belongs on A Flock Of Seagulls' "I Ran (So Far Away"). And no, that's not a bad thing. First single "11th Dimension" takes the synths fixation up to a new level. "Ludlow Street," which tackles Casablancas' much publicized drinking problem (he recently said he's stopped drinking), is a catchy, banjo-filled folky number mixed with programmed beats.

"4 Chords Of The Apocalypse," however, is pretty much Phrazes Of The Young's only misstep. It meanders back and forth between electronic and Strokes-esque instrumentation and ends up going nowhere.

If The Strokes never make another album, let's hope Casablancas keeps cranking his records out.

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