Flak Magazine: Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights, 10.10.02

Interpol has the dubious distinction of being the most talked-about New York band since the Strokes. This may not sound like much, seeing as how that band's first album, Is This It? was released just a year ago. But then that release was very much a watershed moment in recent music history, at least within the New York city limits: It was when the rest of the country finally rediscovered the New York post-punk scene. The Strokes were on "Saturday Night Live" in record time, and in CD players and Sam Goodys nationwide soon after.

But music hipsters are fickle people, always afraid of falling for sellout bands or being had by sneaky record labels that replicate the garage sound in a multimillion-dollar studio. And with the Strokes on RCA, the "moment" looks endangered — how long until major-label A&R guys poach the rest of the New York scene's herd? As a result, like a mother hamster turning on her young at the slightest sign of danger, fans have turned on any band that even smells like they have spent the afternoon lounging in an EMI limo.

Which brings us to Interpol. Flying the Matador flag, the band should be relatively safe; to its credit, Interpol spent the better part of the last four years playing in obscurity. On the other hand, in the month since its first full-length album, Turn on the Bright Lights, appeared, the band, whose shtick is to dress in suits and ties on stage, has begun cropping up everywhere, in fashion spreads profiles in major magazine, their faces bearing just the right mix of dour and confused. They may not be on RCA, but they've got the pose, and the exposure, down pat.

Nor does it help that Turn on the Bright Lights has garnered attention largely for its eerie resemblance to the work of Joy Division, down to the fragile guitars and morose yet at times explosive voice of Paul Banks, whom critics have crowned a latter-day Ian Curtis. It's a hallmark of the early 2000's New York scene to imbibe retro whole-hog; the squads of post-punk, electro-clash and neo-garage bands coming out of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side are marked largely by the critics' ability to tie them to the Velvet Underground, Television or any of a plethora of bands that emerged from roughly the same territory 20-30 years earlier.

But what truly defines Interpol is not how much they resemble Joy Division but that, for all their brooding and bass, they fail to deliver the same energy that drove Ian Curtis and Co. out of Manchester and onto the underground rock scene in the late 1970s. Much of Turn on the Bright Lights is, at best, a muddled penumbra surrounding a few solid tracks. Namely, the first three — few albums begin as strongly as this one. Tracks 1 and 2, "Untitled" and "Obstacle 1," are a perfectly balanced duo — the first full of slow, pregnant longing in both instrument and lyrics ("I will surprise you sometime/ I'll come around"), the second all anger and flying chords, with Banks yelling "You'll go stabbing yourself in the neck." "Untitled" is a song taking a walk through the park on a cold October day; "Obstacle 1" is that same song contemplating a swan dive into the Central Park Resevoir.

The third track, "NYC," the most elegiac of the band's efforts, rolls along effortlessly, adding and subtracting layers of guitars, backing vocals and drums, while Banks croons: "The subway she is a porno/ and the pavements they are a mess/ I know you supported me a long time/ somehow I'm not impressed."

And yet "NYC," for all its aural beauty, bears within it the seeds of what haunts the rest of the album — meaningless, often silly lyrics that clash with the darkness of the instruments and the head-hanging seriousness of Banks' voice. "The subway she is a porno." Eh?

The fourth track, "PDA" (which joined "NYC" on an earlier EP), sinks to the same degree that "NYC" rises. It definitely has its moments, such as when Banks sings, "Yours is the only version of my desertion that I could ever subscribe to," assumedly to a confused yet entrancing lover. Banks channels Peter Murphy with his sharp, deep voice and drop-dead serious tone, only to jump into a bouncy chorus that spins around the phrase "We have 200 couches where you can sleep tight." Right. But what on earth does that mean?

What's more, the range of tone that the band exhibits in the early tracks begins to fall flat in the album's second half; by "Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down" Interpol begins to feel like a pony with only one trick. Or two, in that the album seems unable to move beyond the "slow and dark" and "fast and dark" dichotomy set up by the first pair of tracks. By the time track 9 ("Roland") rolls around, you're just biding your time until the CD loops back to the beginning. If this album came out in the early '80s, you'd never flip the record.

Which may sound harsher than it is meant to be; there is still a lot of good to be found in the album. Nevertheless, it is hardly the "debut of the year" that critics have taken to calling it. And ultimately, the merits of Turn on the Bright Lights is only one piece of the Interpol pie: There are the suits, and the catty yet world-weary interviews with the band (Bassist Carlos Dengler reportedly told a French newspaper that "When I see a badly dressed guy, it makes me sick.") And while the success or failure of the band in replicating the Strokes' moonshot will have little effect on the still-healthy New York music scene, Interpol's willingness to model their predecessor's "complete package" image of fashion model and rock star bodes darkly for a community that is still more concerned with good music than good looks. On the other hand, the lopsided Turn on the Bright Lights, combined with Interpol's apparent interest in self-promotion at all cost, may yet bring in fans more interested in threads than songs.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)