More Wretched Music! The Strokes: Angles

We are now on the 10th anniversary of the release of The Strokes break away album, This is It, in which the Strokes broke away and became a hugely selling rock and roll band by playing their own brand of indie rock garage rock. Now they have a new album. You can listen to it here:
http://new.thestrokes.com/uncategorized/listen-to-angles-here
The fact that they broke out and became the huge commercial success that they did meant that endless art student types gave up whatever they were working on to create indie rock bands in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan for a decade. The press became focused on bands over anything else. The money behind it all was a company called American Apparel, now under investigation everywhere for fraud and besieged with sexual harassment lawsuits. Thus was the rise of the modern hipster. I heard the term occasionally in the 90’s, but the hipster culture as we know it today was really as far as I can see shaped by the rise of the Strokes and American Apparel. The money for all the hipster magazines came from American Apparel, the myth of the indie pop garage band suddenly making a lot of cash came from the Strokes. And that was ten years of hipster crap in New York.
What does it sound like? How is this new album? You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s awful. They were always awful. This not Lou Reed with Metallica- there are no musical risks or unpredictable moves whatsoever. It isn’t especially heavy or energetic. One song sounds suspiciously like “Reeling in the Years” by Steely Dan. There’s not a lot on this album that the Kinks or the Ramones didn’t do, except when they throw in some eighties synth. If you count the songs with the synths there’s nothing on this album that wasn’t done by the Kinks, the Ramones or Roxy Music didn’t do. This album sounds like stock audio.
I was surprised to see that the Strokes sold out Madison Square Garden. There is still an audience for this band, but it is a mainstream audience. There’s no illusion about them representing any kind of fringe or underground. There’s nothing good or interesting about this band. There never was.
Here’s the footage of the band playing pin pong, among other things.