Send "Julian Casablancas " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 From the beginning: I read a review of Is This It, which my father handed me. It said, “put on the Strokes. Bounce” and I did. I saw the band live at the Avalon in Boston that year; Julian Casablancas, their lead singer, had dirty, long hair and a leather jacket. The girls were in love. There were too many bands called “The [somethings]” (White Stripes, Hives…) that year. Walking from the Charles River up to the Quad in 2003, I listened to Room on Fire with my friend Will, and he convinced me it was better than the original. I lost interest. I moved to New York, where there were many other rock bands with lead singers in leather jackets. Bounce gave way to bombast, then to whispered finger-picking, then to haunted electro dreams. The efforts of various members of the band, on their own, to recreate the Strokes moment seemed admirable, but a little thin. Apart from a few songs, I didn’t take much interest. I saw the drummer Fabrizio Moretti with Drew Barrymore at a bar near Union Square. My friends didn’t believe it was them; Moretti said “it’s not me”. Did they release a third album? I moved away from New York. Then, after what seemed like forever, “11th Dimension” hit the internet. It was a rekindling, but in a fresh, stimulating way. Casablancas + synths came out not formulaic, but bracing and thrilling. The pep of the consonants “Your faith has got to be greater than your fear” and the slurred, drunken chorus. There were some clues this was going to be good: Casablancas had released the one-off collaboration with Santigold and Pharrell for Converse, “My Drive Thru”, and had appeared on the Sparklehorse/Danger Mouse album from this year—both solid singles, lent an air of rock star cool by the frontman and his yes, leather jacket....full text |
| Nme |
| "Somewhere along the way, my hopefulness turned to sadness/ Somewhere along the way, my sadness turned to bitterness…” Suffice to say, the first two lines that slur out of the speakers after pressing ‘play’ on ‘Phrazes For The Young’ will be instant red flags to any Strokes fan combing Julian Casablancas’ solo debut for portents of doom. As the verse progresses, his bitterness then leads to anger, his anger inextricably to vengeance and his vengeance – oddly enough – to an unabashedly euphoric, Paul Simon-esque mardi-gras gallop of a chorus that, like a lot of things about this album, you’ll never see coming. After four troubling years of collective inactivity, individual Strokes have all of a sudden been going rogue left, right and centre: Fab Moretti and Nikolai Fraiture are both off working on their respective side-projects Little Joy and Nickel Eye, while Albert Hammond, Jr.’s solo albums have found him a niche as a sort of lo-fi Albert Hammond Sr....full text |
| Thephoenix |
| Someday, a great rock film will be made. The opening shot is of a wasted rock star, bejeweled and clad in the finest leather, with white panthers circling the living room of his Parthenon-esque manse as he hits PLAY on a comically large reel-to-reel. As the tape spins, the camera pulls back down endless hallways symmetrically lined with Greek statues, disappearing into a lux interior horizon. Echoing endlessly as it does so is a plaintive voice bathed in swirlingly synthetic keyboards; it’s soothing-yet-disturbing, eventually arcing into labyrinthine fugues at once Baroque and modern. The rhythms are jittery and endless, locking in with the synthesizers in an economical package of sound that snugly fits with the warm croon of the vocals while at the same time making lyrical inquiries pointless....full text |
Julian Casablancas lyrics
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