People We Like: Julian Casablancas

Julian Casablancas is a New Yorker unlike any other. First off, he is currently based in Los Angeles, which is a little strange for someone so attached to the city that never sleeps. His youthful, eager, yet slightly confused face first emerged on the scene in 2001 when his equally young and eager band, The Strokes, permeated the surface of what used to be rock’n'roll and left a print that was to be followed by so many peers for the following decade that their beginning opus, Is This It, has been named one of the top five albums of the Noughties. Not bad for a bunch of over-educated white collar Lower East Siders.

The five-some sort of retired after releasing a third LP, First Impressions of Earth in 2005, that dealt more with their 80s glamrock influences than the 60s and 70s Velvet Underground meets The Jam sound that had made them famous. Never taking that leather jacket off but adorning hairdos defying gravity and, in the case of moody guitarist Nick Valensi, hygiene, The Strokes withdrew into their own individual worlds to produce what they had inside their own heads. Albert Hammond Jr., the afro-wearing, Fender-loving guitarist, didn’t do so bad on his own with his solo career; the sullen and shy bassist Nikolai Fraiture is finding confidence and sass in his outfit Nickel Eye, and Nick Valensi has been, well, raising babies he had with a New York-based bleached socialite. Everything was well in the world of rock’n'roll, except that The Strokes’ absence started to feel a little strange, and Julian Casablancas’ drunken slurs over Santogold songs were out of place.

Once the idol of a generation without asking anything from anyone, the shy, self-conscious and painfully self-aware twenty-something just wanted to make music with his best friends and landed his once-in-a-lifetime dream come true when Fender Magazine asked him to interview Lou Reed. At this moment, it felt like Julian Casablancas had everything checked on his to-do list and would perhaps never re-emerge on the music scene, bar the elusive guest spot on a song or producing stint. But not unlike Eminem, Julian Casablancas suddenly burst out of his box with a noisy, catchy, colorful and pretty disturbing solo opus. Phrazes For The Young is everything you would not expect from Casablancas, mixed with everything you wish a Casablancas album would be. Damn him.

The first single, “11th Dimension”, easily threw me off. It’s a musical 4th of July show in downtown Tennessee: unstoppable, popular, contagious, and terribly tacky. Stopping the evaluation of the album at a strange choice of a first single track would be a terrible, terrible mistake. Julian Casablancas has never hidden his appreciation for the new wave movement and his fascination for the movie Tron, a cult-classic that feels just as dated but gleeful as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. Eventually, Julian Casablancas had to steer away from the guitar god that he never was, and bring about the funny, self-deprecating, jukebox lover within him. Outside of The Strokes, Julian Casablancas could have lost his place in the music industry. Instead, he is playing with all the instruments that never made it in the band before. I mean synthesizers galore.

His personality, as complex as it is fascinating, a walking dichotomy covered with a heavy coat of drinking tar, reveals itself in waves of excitement and depression, much like a certain Ian Curtis who no one would dare name-dropping in this review (ahem). The opening track, “Out Of The Blue”, the only track that is not too alienating to Strokes fans, clearly states, “somewhere along the way / my sadness turned to anger / and the ones that I made pay / were the ones that didn’t deserve it”. Casablancas is not only breaking free, he is also breaking loose, and if growing pains are usually shameful and embarrassing to witness, he turns them into a poetic vision with his songwriting gift. “Rivers of Brakelights” is the song that never made it onto a Phillip Boa record, because no one would have been bold enough to mix guitar loops, Caribbean drums, and a shot of Kahlua in the same spot. The question is not about why Casablancas waited so long to put it out – the question is more about why even The Strokes refused this glorious explosion of doom.

Show-stoppers such as the appropriately named “Ludlow Street”, in reference to the infamous Velvet Underground spot, are directly addressing Julian’s problem with the bottle, with a maturity and a sneer rarely seen in artists waiting for their audience to salt their wounds (see: Beck with Sea Change, only contributed to the annual suicide rate). “Glass” is another number that exposes the complexity of emotions only Garbage managed to coin in one single snapshot (“I’m Only Happy When It Rains”), which was lost among The Strokes’ collective greatness in producing timeless rock’n'roll records that left the lyrics to the confused and literary critics (“I try but you see / it’s hard to explain.”)

His voice is still low, his demeanour is still careless and appealing; by revealing more cards in his game, Julian Casablancas did not make himself easier to read. Much to the contrary, he is adding to the gallery of contradictions and unexpected appearances that make up his career so far. Adding so much expectation is good promoting tool when The Strokes’ fourth album is set to hit the shelves sometimes in 2010, a much-awaited reunion that does not condone the members’ solo careers, but revive them in ways they could not see fit. Casablancas, soon to be a first time father, can be proud of himself and sit on that very Napoleon-like throne: he is just about to claim that Lower East Side crown back, and boy, did he fucking earn it.