Albert Hammond, Jr. - Yours to Keep

Release Date: March 6, 2007

★★★★★ Tracks:
Bright Young Thing
Back to the 101


A couple of years back, Chavez wrote a great post about the weaknesses in both Julian Casablancas’s and Albert Hammond, Jr.’s solo material. You should give it a read if you haven’t done so already. In summary, he states that Hammond, Jr.’s shoddy songwriting can’t be saved by his great guitar riffs, and on the other hand Casablancas has a lot of great songwriting ideas, but doesn’t have Hammond, Jr.’s chops to tie those ideas together. I agree with just about everything he wrote. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Yours to Keep contains the best Strokes-related material outside of a Strokes records to date. If “Back to the 101,” with its Television-like guitar work, was sung by Casablancas it could fit neatly anywhere on Is This It or . And the slow building, music box sounding “Bright Young Thing” was easily one of the best tracks of 2007. Yours to Keep isn’t essential by any stretch of the imagination, but a Strokes fan could surely find a few gems to mine here.