I wouldn't advocate trying to sound like the Strokes because the sound of Is This It is very distinctive and popular, so anything that sounds remotely similar comes across as a ripoff (including their second album). However, I would disagree with the generally negative attitude on this board towards the Strokes recordings based on its "unnatural sound" and poor quality sound. Though I'm a relative newbie to recording, my time of careful listening to various eras of music recording has told me that obtaining a "good" sound is subject to personal tastes, era, styles, and fads. There are many examples of this: the sound of the drums on the white album is a great sound, but you don't hear it much anymore; if you had played a mix of a Nickelback-ish recording to Zeppelin back in the day they might have thought somebody had accidentally turned the drums waaay too far down and the guitars waaay too far up, and they might have called it a bad mix. Well, a lot of people here might agree with that, and I would be so inclined as well, but on the other hand, the mixing of a song like D'yer Mak'er is very idiosyncratic and unique (the drums are super up front with the vocal way back), which is part of what makes it so great, but a Nickelback fan might call it bad mixing cause it doesn't fit in with the mix scheme he is looking for. It's the same with the Strokes. They've done some unique stuff: I personally hadn't heard that the guitars are tracked more often than average or that they're run direct and processed, but they're definitely panned hard and the vocal is distinctive in its tone and distortion, which I agree is done probably through a small solid state amp. The audio is not very clean, and perhaps that's why the strokes are subject to so much audio snobbery over here, but that messy sound is part of the fad in the indie scene, which the Strokes have had a huge hand in introducing to a much larger public. I can understand not liking it for its audio properties, as long as its understood that personal taste is not the authority on whether it's a good sound or not.
By the way, I wouldn't bore you all with so much writing, but I'm stuck at work with nothing better to do