Comedown Machine

While a few songs are leftovers from Angles and some were churned out “like the good old days” as they put it, Comedown Machine is a terrific release to The Strokes first five albums.

Fans of Angles should rejoice as Comedown Machine is essentially a refined version of that album’s strengths.

It’s flawed, it’s imperfect and it’s downright odd at points, but it is packed with belting tunes. Most of all, it’s fun.

The Strokes' most mature music yet, Comedown Machine is a solidly enjoyable album, even if it lacks some of the band's previous spark.

Comedown Machine is, essentially, The Strokes' 1980s album.

Comedown Machine has done the best thing The Strokes could have done.

The Strokes will never get back the raw magic of Is This It? but, with Comedown Machine, they’ve cast a different spell entirely--one that’s almost joyful.

The songs here might take a little longer to unlock than their predecessors, but none of them strike a false note.

Comedown Machine is their best album since they hit perfection with their debut. [Apr 2013, p.102]

They’ve returned with their most thought provoking, strange and sexiest record yet.

Comedown Machine may not quite hit the heights of the band's masterpiece-to-date, but it continues the band's healthy trend of finding curious new ways to twist and complicate its by-now instinctively recognizable sound. [No. 98, p.60]

The elements are still there, but they aren’t fused in a way consistent with the hopes of those who foresaw The Strokes being the best rock band of our tim

["Call It Fate, Call It Karma"] provides Comedown with a gorgeous, um, comedown. It’s a surprising ending to exactly the kind of record that will surprise no one--solid, energetic, and with a decent hit-to-miss ratio.

On Angles, the band tossed a few tunes out that sounded like carbon-copies of their first album, but on Machine they eschew that kind of market compromise in favor of following their strange muse, even if in the end most listeners will have trouble pegging down who it sounds like.

They’ve tossed a simple, solid album in our lap, thrown up the deuce and strolled out the door, take it or leave it.

The risks feel warranted, even if it doesn’t result in something that’s sticky or punchy. This might explain why the album doesn’t carry a single hit.

It's an LP that finds the band in complete comfort with in their place in the musical universe and willing to stretch out here and there into slightly uncomfortable postures.

It attempt to meld guitars with '80s Europop much like Phoenix has done, to the extent that single "One Way Trigger" sounds like A-Ha. The experiment is often successful. [Apr 2013, p.78]

Comedown Machine [is] reliably solid, mostly enjoyable, slightly disappointing for reasons that are difficult to articulate.

There are an awful lot of ideas swimming through Comedown's 11 tracks--some familiar, others (like Casablancas' new fascination with falsetto) not so familiar.

While Comedown Machine drags itself through a number of dead zones (most notably the dud pair of the title track and “50 50”), there are moments where they recapture some of what made them a great band.

The deeply uncool Comedown Machine smacks of effort.... Still, the limitations of Comedown Machine's protracted diversity all come back to Casablancas, a man with wide range as a listener and extremely narrow range as a musician.

It's a bloodless, disembodied album, rarely flushed with human warmth. [May 2013, p.94]

Rather than give us a full album of "The Strokes Misremember the '80s," the band falls back repeatedly on self-imitation.

The results aren’t all winners, but there are gems where you wouldn’t expect them.

Comedown Machine is an enjoyable album with some great moments, though not a perfect or definitive one.

Comedown Machine remains a pretty good album, possibly the least characteristic thing they've released to date.

Full of clever sounds, with melodies butting up against countermelodies and more laughs than you might think, Comedown Machine is by no means a bad record. It just has the misfortune of being the record that few Strokes fans want from them.

They're virtually unrecognisable as the band that made their game-changing debut, save perhaps for "All the Time."

Comedown Machine is basically a solo trip for singer Julian Casablancas, showing yet again how much he respects Eighties New Wave.

It is without a plan and without much of an aim, save for vague touchstones in ‘80s pop and new wave, a path tread much more smoothly by Casablancas’ prior solo work.

The Strokes’ hallmarks--those lean melodies, that steely interplay among guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. and bassist Nikolai Fraiture, the urgency of Julian Casablancas’s vocals--are largely absent on Comedown Machine, their fifth studio album. In their place is a looseness that’s refreshing enough, until you realize these guys are perhaps running short on ideas.

In one sense, it’s commendable that The Strokes are so willing to branch out and take on different styles, yet the effort often sounds overplayed or undercooked.

The production on most of Comedown Machine is off-putting in its chilliness.

Comedown Machine is a more even effort [than Angles], but it lacks any show-stopping moments, allowing the forgettable songs to blend together.

The band vacillates between rudderless tone poems ("'80s Comedown Machine"), exhausting rave-ups (the screeching "50/50"), and bizarre A-ha biting ("One Way Trigger"), all of which overflow with incomplete ideas.

For all the loving homages to past recording techniques, they sound laboured and bored. [May 2013, p.84]

It’s wilful experimentation with no pay-off, sounding lonely, old, with only the occasional, tempting flicker of a genius that once burnt bright.

Just like the band itself, it presents something of an ongoing identity crisis for the band, one that hasn’t figured out how to advance their sound except to put more meat on the bones.

The band can still come up with strong hooks, and some of the 80s guitar rock references hit their mark, but the results are sabotaged by singer Julian Casablancas, who sounds like he’s conserving all his energy and passion for his next solo record.

The Strokes have shamefully settled for average, and have failed even at that.

Nothing on Comedown Machine really sounds natural either; it comes across awkward, hollow, like dead-chemistry trying listlessly to spark.

While it introduces some interesting new ideas to The Strokes' repertoire, there are more clunkers here than anything resembling the dizzy highs of Is This It.