Waking Ear

The Strokes/"12:51" -- Like most Strokes songs, this seemed fairly unremarkable to me at first, but it's become a total earworm, sucking away my head's bandwidth like a particularly nasty Sobig virus. It's all in the Ocasek-y keybs and Casablancas' insistence upon the megaphonish vocal filter.

It reminds me a little bit of the way the Stone Temple Pilots 80's-afied their sound with their 1996 hit "Big Bang Baby" just by dropping in some handclaps and doing a video that looked all whitewashed like Toni Basil's "Mickey."

This is what I like about STP: they were so effortless. They were chameleons who didn't invent a single thing. Weiland sounded like Vedder when it was convenient and then like Layne Staley or whoever when it was convenient, and then STP tried to get a little artier and ended up sounding like Siamese Dream on one song and like the Black Crowes on another, and then the handclaps.

STP songs are like Law and Order episodes. There isn't necessarily a single formula. There are many known formulas, and you just pick which one you want to use today, and people will like it because they're comfortable with it. It's instant radio.

I think Faulkner or somebody said once that there are only about seven storylines. There are only seven songs in STP's world, and the band had about seven hits over a five-year span by running through 'em.

A lot of bands couldn't pull this off. Candlebox did stuff that was every bit as radio-friendly and as maudlin as STP's "Plush," but they kept sticking with the mope and it went away. STP just kept on adapting. STP was a fighter.

Oh, on a separate note, I thought you'd all like to see our regular comments contributor and my friend, Chelle, with the future father of her children.