Is This It

Eleven short tracks, and inside each song the subtractive test finds almost nothing: no introduction is padded, no solo outstays its few bars, and every song stops when its last chorus has landed. Is This It must open, a slow, loping title song that asks the record’s question before the speed starts. Last Nite and Hard to Explain are the record’s two cores and could not go. Take It or Leave It must close, the one place the voice is pushed to a shout, an ultimatum after ten tracks of shrugging. Economy is the record’s first virtue and it is nearly complete. The test bites only across the sequence: Soma, Alone, Together and Trying Your Luck share one tempo, one texture and one stance, and any one of them could go with little lost.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: for the young of a rich city at the turn of the century, intimacy has become a pose of not caring, and the pose is the only honesty left. The title asks it of a relationship and of an age (“Is this it”). Last Nite (“Last night she said”) gives a quarrel shrugged off; Someday looks back on “good old days” from inside them. The sound discloses as fully as the words, and is credited as fully: the voice set behind a filter, as if heard through a wall, is the distance the songs describe, made audible. What holds it is that the condition is rendered as manner more than articulated as meaning: the words are fragments, often half heard, and the finding lies close to a mood of cool exhaustion.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation is of one kind, the rush of a band locked tight, felt as speed and release, and it comes often. Last Nite lifts on its guitar break. Hard to Explain is the height: its machine-tight beat opens into a sung chorus of real reach, with a guitar line climbing over it. Someday has a bright, rueful lift, and Take It or Leave It ends the record at full force; The Modern Age and Barely Legal have drive. The title song sways rather than rises, and Soma, Alone, Together and Trying Your Luck stay level. The limit is the ceiling: the heights are exhilaration, not transport, grandeur or dread, reached by momentum inside a short song and never sustained. Frequent and warm, within one register.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Myth is evoked and lightly built. The record summons one pattern, the city at night and the young who own it and are bored by it, a figure as old as the flâneur and as recent as the Velvet Underground’s New York. New York City Cops names the city and its law; Last Nite and Barely Legal stage seduction and refusal; The Modern Age names the time; the title asks its question of an age. The pattern is consistent across all eleven songs and colours each of them. What holds it is that the pattern bears little weight: no figure carries it, no place is particular beyond a name, and the sequence makes no passage. The myth of the band’s image and reception belongs to neither music nor words, and is not credited.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The inheritance is the New York rock of the 1970s, the Velvet Underground, Television and the Modern Lovers above all, with the British guitar pop that followed. The record’s own decade was nu metal, post-grunge, polished pop and electronic music, and the turn was against that decade: back to a lean two-guitar band with almost no effects, a voice filtered to sound cheap, and drums played to the exactness of a machine. The stake was small in money and real in fashion, a band betting that the old form would sound new. What holds it below the gate is that a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve, and this path was proven twenty-five years before. The originality is in the mixture, the interlock and the restraint: a strong accent and a well-timed return.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The record’s stance, not caring and caring too much under it, lives in the form: two guitars each playing one fixed part, interlocking like gears, so that no one shows off; drums that never vary; a voice pushed behind a filter, present and withheld at once. The brevity is the stance too, songs that stop before they could plead. Played clean, slow or orchestrated, these songs would be complaints; played this way they are a pose with feeling leaking through. The sequence is counted here, once: a slow, questioning opener, a run of short songs in one stance, and a shouted close that drops the pose. Held from the top because the middle of the sequence is a set of songs, and one frame repeated eleven times is a container as often as an instrument.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over twenty-five years. The record is still returned to whole, and the return is chiefly formal. The two guitars reward close listening: how each holds one part, how the two are made to sound like a single instrument, and how the restraint that keeps them from colliding is itself a design. The bass under the title song and the written solos of Last Nite and Hard to Explain reward return. Against that, the semantic yield is thin and mostly taken at first hearing: the words are fragments whose stance is clear at once, and return finds the same pose rather than a new meaning. Much of the return is to a sound and a moment, ritual more than discovery. The depth is formal and narrow, and real.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The field is the rock album of its decade. The intrinsic force is a return made exact: the record showed that the lean guitar band of the 1970s could be played with a new precision and heard as present rather than as revival, and it reorganised little beyond that. The stronger part is the timing: it changed what rock could be in 2001, in a decade of nu metal, post-grunge and polished pop. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is placed high whenever its decade is counted and three of its songs remain in broadcast and use. It is commonly credited with opening the guitar-band revival of the following years, in New York and in Britain; that credit is reported, not verified here. What holds it is that much of its reach was of an image, a look and a city.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Survival is weighed over twenty-five years, on form, presence, then fabric. The form is whole, in print since release in both editions. Presence is continuous and wide: Last Nite, Someday and Hard to Explain stay in broadcast and in use, the album is heard whole by listeners born after it, and it is placed high whenever its decade is counted; popularity is presence, not proof. The fabric was made to be dateless, a lean band, a dry room and a deliberately cheap sound, with none of the period’s gloss, and it has aged less than most rock of 2001. Charged: the record’s image, the look and the downtown scene of its moment, is fixed to that moment and carries part of its presence, and the split of editions leaves two records in circulation.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, read to the same anchors as every desk. The making is load-bearing, because the sound is the stance. The two guitars of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. are arranged as parts of one machine: one holds a chopping rhythm, the other a melodic line, and they rarely double. Fabrizio Moretti’s drums keep a dry, unvarying time close to a drum machine’s; Nikolai Fraiture’s bass carries the title song’s melody. Gordon Raphael’s sound is dry, close and exact, the voice deliberately degraded, and the narrow palette is used with precision; Valensi’s short solos are written, not jammed. The faults: a palette so narrow that tracks blur, a filter that sometimes obscures more than it distances, and three songs made to a formula. The aim is narrow, and within it nearly faultless.

Score: 8.9 / 10

One law governs the record: feeling held behind a pose, and the pose played with exactness. The two most distant elements obey it. The title song, slow and swaying, and Take It or Leave It, the fastest and loudest, are the same shrug, once tired and once furious; the ruefulness of Someday and the sneer of New York City Cops meet in the same dry sound. Nothing in the record breaks its law, from the first bar of the title song to the last shout of the closing track, and no song reaches for a manner the rest does not share. What holds it is range: the law is tested over a narrow field, one band, one band of tempo, one stance and one texture for eleven songs, and narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as a stance of detachment with feeling under it. The couple is held, as seduction, quarrel and refusal across most songs. The city is present, as nightlife and as a name. The law and the state appear once, as the police of New York City Cops, a song absent from the American issue, which narrows the record further. Youth and its pleasures, drink, sex and boredom, are the ground. One stance joins what is there. What holds it lowest of the twelve is what is not there: labour, the family, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent, and what is present lies close together, one age and one class in one city at night.

Score: 7.2 / 10