As a general rule, I don't bother with side-projects. There's a particular alchemy of a band that I dig, and one or more members stepping out of the idiom is usually less a serious artistic statement that a documentary of down-time or a plateful of esoteric noodling disquised as an off-shoot of more popular material. Jack White is the exception that proves the rule; as he constantly drums into our media awareness, Jack doesn't have side projects. He just belongs to three different bands.
Julian Cascablancas, on the other hand, is not the first choice for a side-project that I had to just run out and buy. Unlike White, who draws off a seemingly endless supply of energy and passion to preach long and loud for all things rock n' roll, Cascablancas effuses ambiguity towards everything he touches, and has ever since the Strokes sliced "New York City Cops" from Is This It in the wake of 9/11. Critics have delved deep into his vocal performances (Here's Spin making no sense about First Impressions of Earth, after doubling-down on Room on Fire), but he remains opaque, as though keenly aware that he's putting himself, his bandmates, and his audience on, and not knowing why.
And that's the kind of blathersome nonsense you end up writing about Julian Cascablancas if you insist on trying to figure him out. To my mind, this remains one of the biggest problems with music criticism. The immediacy and emotion of music leads us to believe that we have some kind of insight onto the artist's soul, that we know him or her. Perhaps that's why fans are so demanding; having been moved by someone's work, they paradoxically feel as though they have a claim on that person's intimacy. For some reason, no one can express the relationship between musician and audience as that of entertainer and entertained except cynically, as Nirvana did.
So let me just cop right out to knowing nothing at all about Cascablancas' purpose in releasing this solo album, at this time. I don't know if he wanted to speak his own mind before returning his nose to the grindstone of the new Strokes album, or to whet the appetite of Strokes fans for same, or anything else. And neither does anyone else. The only person who might know is Julian, and even if he does, he's not saying anything we wouldn't expect an artist to say. Maybe he just wanted to make a cool record.
If that's the case, he succeeded. Phrazes For The Young is lots of fun, without being insipide, cute, or cloying. And Cascablancas' vocals make a difference in this, supplying just enough gravitas to the proceedings to lend the feeling of a proper, professional pop album, rather than a cynical mesh-in of T&A and Autotune. Whether he croons, croaks, or howls, it juxtaposes nicely with the synth flush and polyrythmnic play. And unlike a great deal of what gets called pop today, which seems to offer nothing but the turgid sensationalization of ambiguous sexuality, Phrazes For The Young has no problem letting you know where its balls are, without making them the reason for the whole exercise.
A departure from the Strokes? Sure, but not a cataclysmic one, not something that suggests a permanent break with his old band (and since the album hasn't even charted on Billboard, he's unlikely to have an economic reason to, either). Repeated listens offer uncovered nuggets of digitized soul, which augment rather than distract from the original pleasures. In short, Cascablancas has justified his own status as a craftsman of pop music. Whatever happens with the band that made him a star, he need never doubt that he deserved to be one.
Grade: L
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