The Strokes

Though they've spent the past year playing relatively big-ass rooms like the one they'll play here Saturday night, don't the Strokes seem like a smaller, cooler rock band today than the one they were last fall? Minus the all-Strokes-all-the-time media coverage that met its release, Is This It, the group's debut album, sounds like a really, really great night out with the people you most like to be around--in a bar, in a car, whatever, and no one's gotta be at work in the morning. If you've seen the band's video for current single "Someday," in which they kick it with scraggly old Guided by Voices under ostensibly similar circumstances, you know that this is probably what they were aiming for, as opposed to magazine-world domination. Savor the small stakes before the machinery starts up again around Album No. 2.