Julian Casablancas (WireImage)
(
)
Last year, Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. heard an awful new album.
“It was stale,” Hammond tells The Post. “It sounded like music made by people who once loved something and were put into a room, beaten and managed to churn out something they hated.”
What really galled Hammond about the recording was that it had been made by his band, and was intended to be the Strokes’ long-awaited follow-up to 2006’s “First Impressions of Earth.”
“We listened to what we made, looked at each other and knew we couldn’t release that,” Hammond adds. “It wasn’t any good.”
The group had spent the better part of a year working with Grammy-winning producer Joe Chiccarelli, whose credits include acts as varied as U2, Tori Amos and the White Stripes. But despite the producer’s storied past, he didn’t hit it off with the former “saviors of rock,” who electrified New York City and the world with their 2001 debut “Is This It.”
“He was trying to do as little editing as possible, to the point where we were at take 70 of a song,” guitarist Nick Valensi recently groused to Rolling Stone. “It felt so strict.”
The band — which also includes singer Julian Casablancas, bassist Nikolai Fraiture and drummer Fabrizio Moretti — had taken a live demo of 18 songs to Chiccarelli in 2009. They worked with him for months at Avatar Studios here in the city, but wound up keeping just one track, “Life Is Simple in the Moonlight,” the final cut on “Angles.”
Hammond says that kind of culling isn’t unusual for the Strokes, who play Madison Square Garden on April 1. “We’ve done that before — we try things, and if they’re not right, we get over the time, effort and money we spent on something that just didn’t work.”
The solution to getting “Angles” right was getting loose again, and not trying to tackle the entire record at once. The band moved their work space from a high-priced New York City studio to Hammond’s Catskills farm.
“I knew we could fix this album; we just had to feel the music again,” Hammond says. Taking baby steps, the band headed for the barn with the small goal of recording just a single song, “Machu Picchu.” It was the only tune from the initial demo that hadn’t been recorded yet. “We had a ‘let’s see what happens’ attitude, and the payoff was amazing. It sounded like it was something very different and new sounding and it was still very Strokes,” he adds. “When you get that kind of excitement, you don’t stop the momentum. We rerecorded the drums, then the guitars. It all started to fall into place.”
One of the reasons Hammond’s farm environment worked was that almost everyone was there — all the time.
“I’d wake up and go into the studio with Nick and start playing,” he recalls. “It wasn’t like, ‘Where are the other guys?’ Everyone was around the house. We were all coming and going as we pleased. It was relaxed, it was fun and it felt like anything was possible. That was the magic.”
The one key player absent from Hammond’s version of Big Pink was Casablancas. Instead of hashing songs out face to face with his Strokes-mates, Casablancas delivered his vocal tracks through e-mailed files.
While that seems incredibly impersonal, Hammond defends the singer, saying, “Julian didn’t want to stifle the rest of us with his opinions — it was his way of making us stronger as a band.”
While many speculated that this attack of lead-singer syndrome was a symptom of the ultimate demise of the Strokes, Hammond disagrees, saying: “We’re a very organic band and we still feel love, but like in anything, there are times we all need time to be alone. That doesn’t mean we don’t respect and love.”
Without Casablancas around, the rest of the Strokes got their first taste of true creative
democracy. The singer had written every song on the group’s previous releases, frequently dictating what the guitars, bass and drums would play, as well. On “Angles,” which arrives in stores on Tuesday, each member contributed musical ideas. Fraiture recently told Spin, “It was a completely different way of working. We listened to everyone’s ideas with open ears and came to collective decisions. Everyone had an opinion.”
The album’s title, “Angles,” refers to the multiple perspectives that went into the recording.
That was one of the hardest parts for Hammond, who says: “It’s an easy thing to say we’re all going to accept everyone’s ideas, sift through them and do what’s best for the Strokes. It’s harder to actually do it. It’s hard on your ego to have your songs torn apart by friends, but it does make the songs better and lets the band evolve.”
And then with a slyness that he suddenly discovered the secret Strokes formula, Hammond adds, “We just have to trust each other.”