Review Summary: “Give the humans what they want / Some music for them to blow their brains out to”
I know next to nothing about Julian Casablancas as a person, but if his music is anything to go by, he isn’t nearly as interesting as he believes himself to be. The Strokes’ sense of coolness was that of a cardboard cutout of Lou Reed, posed, flat and rigid. Right to the point, I find the cultivated sense of urban ennui in his music bland at best, and revolting at worst. Most recently, The Voidz, a band which was meant to revive Casablancas’ creative spark by allowing him to indulge in a more flamboyant sense of experimentation, have returned to decidedly uninspired results. Even to the Voidz fanatics out there (they apparently do exist), the fact that the majority of this album has already been released in one form or other should be a splash of cold water on whatever expectations they might have had for this album.
The interesting thing, the thing that actually made this an album worth mulling over, is that it doesn’t end up feeling like a real album. It’s fractured and incoherent to the point that it becomes disorienting, as though it was made by a being which only has the most rudimentary set of parameters to work with when defining what an album is. Stylistic jumps seem to happen without either design or directions, the only thread holding the whole thing together is a sense of detached insipidity. In itself this is sure, yeah, conceptually interesting, but the only person this seems designed to please is Casablancas himself, and what he’s into doing is only fun for anyone else in fits and starts, as on the pseudo-metal riffing on Prophecy of the Dragon and the actually blistering guitar solo on the insipid dance-pop of Flexorcist. I can just imagine Casablancas nodding to himself in self-congratulation for hitting precisely the 80s simulacrum sound on the intro of Perserverance 1C2S. That simulacral sensibility is exactly what defines this album, and what makes it both unique and, simultaneously, almost a complete stinker.
The truly interesting thing about this is that, for such a spacey album, it’s among the shallowest things I’ve ever heard. That was kind of the appeal of the Strokes, as far as I can guess, but who can fathom the mind that equates soullessness to authenticity? Or, maybe Casablancas just isn’t putting forth the effort on this one out of a sense of laziness, rather than some tongue-in-cheek meta statement. But would that make
Like All Before You a good album, in any sense? When our first real track conjurs The Cure as an AI prompt, but like, with vocoder, what are we supposed to feel? Are we supposed to be nodding along to Casablancas for being clever? Does getting the joke make it funny? The entire album is coated in that same plasticine insincerity, to the point of being insulting. Does this man care about anything? Is the ersatz Muse-worship on When Will the Time of These Bastards End meant to be ironically bad? Does that make it better or worse? I mean sure, probably Julian had some sort of serious intent with this album, and let’s be charitable, perhaps he just couldn’t pull off the vision he was reaching for. After all, I know next to nothing about him as a person. But if someone’s going to make vapidity their chosen aesthetic, maybe it would be worth it to have something, anything, to say about it, rather than just being it.
