Time for another Boo-Boo Album – when a band take all the goodwill they’ve built up over their career and piss it all up a wall by releasing a big massive load of donkey balls instead of a proper album.

This week, the artists in question didn’t have a huge back catalogue to wreck: just one album and a family-sized bucket of hype. But that didn’t stop them doing their best to foul it up. Ladies and gentleman – it’s Room On Fire by The Strokes.

In the year 2001, music was slowly disappearing into a terrifying void of Steps, Hear’Say and Atomic Kitten. ‘Real’ music needed ’saving’. Then the legend goes like this…

The NME saw a picture of scruffy, well-dressed boys and thought "they’ll do". These boys were The Strokes, and later that year, they released Is This It,
an album that almost matched the relentless hype hurled at them. It was
insubstantial, sure, but at the time it was different. It was short, it
was snappy, it didn’t really care what we thought.

But then they had to follow it. In the time they took to tour their
first album and record their second, the world filled up with thousands
of ‘The’ bands. The Datsuns, The Hives, The Vines…
all peddling the same retro New York-ish guitar music. For their next
album, The Strokes would have to record something amazing to stand out
from the rest of the pack.

At first the signs looked good. During the recording of their second album, Albert Hammond Jr said of the new album "It’s
magical, rocking, interesting and everything we’re playing is so new.
It’s like all rocking and then gets weird. What kind of song is this?
It’s fucking the future of rock & roll, man! I say that with no ego
whatsoever. I say that honestly."

What you just read there were the delusions of a fool. It’s true, people did think "What kind of song is this?" when they heard Room On Fire, but then a billionth of a millisecond later, they followed that thought up with "Oh yeah, it’s exactly the same as every single other Strokes song in the history of the world. That’s what kind of song it is".

The songs on Room On Fire were all scratchy, new-wavey and sounded like they had been recorded in an upturned tin bath. Just like Is This It.
And just like all the Strokes impersonators that had cropped up in the
absence of the band. There was no deviation whatsoever. And after all
their lofty proclamations that they were reinventing sound as we know
it, it was mighty disappointing.

Pre Boo-Boo Album: The Strokes were the saviours of the so-called New Rock Revolution.

Post Boo-Boo Album: The Strokes built their own studio to "escape the pressure". A new single is expected in the autumn.

You want to hear it, don’t you? Get Room On Fire for £6.99 inc. free delivery from CDwow.com

[story by Stuart Heritage]