1. Untitled
2. Obstacle 1
3. NYC
4. PDA
5. Say Hello To Angels
6. Hands Away
7. Obstacle 2
8. Stella Was A Diver And She Was Always Down
9. Roland
10. The New
11. Lief Erikson
This is me making good on my attempts to start updating this thing a bit more frequently. It’s also, like before, due to inspiration rather than persistence, so it isn’t really indicative of me trying any harder. This also isn’t even an album that really crossed my mind when I was trying to decide what to write about next. Rather, I read a disparaging comment about Interpol on a message board and responded to it, which made me decide to listen to this album, which reminded me just how much I enjoy it.
It isn’t flawless and there are some things about it that I think are downright bad. But it’s one of those few albums I can listen to regularly and never get tired of (though iTunes tells me it’s been a year since I have). It rarely stands out as incredible to me, but it’s consistent in being above average, in most respects.
I’ll say right now that I didn’t care much for Antics and I never even listened to all of Our Love To Admire, being pretty turned off by the radio singles which demonstrated to me that they were continuing on the downward trend that Antics had started. I’m predicting a fourth album that is a return to form, sans the passion that made this one worthwhile.
I am, however, a big fan of Joy Division. I say this because a lot of people who hate Interpol say “Joy Division did it better,” as if Interpol were a straight rip-off band without any new ideas that nobody familiar with Joy Division and their masterful execution of the post-punk genre would deem to be worth their time. And there are definitely Joy Division influences here, in the melodies and especially in the vocals. Paul Banks’ flat, semi-monotone, droning delivery clearly draws a lot from Ian Curtis.
The similarity ends there. Joy Division were dark, depressive, murky, and sparse. Their songs were bass-driven and minimalist, sinister and borderline-psychotic, like dance music with the joy sucked out of it, a meditation on bleakly sardonic existential dreariness. And they released some phenomenal albums in their short run that preceded Curtis’s suicide. The point is, without much by way of atmosphere or distortion, Joy Division’s music was pitch-black and soul draining in a way that the darkest music now only wishes it could be.
Interpol is not. Their music may not be happy or upbeat, but it isn’t dark. It’s guitar-driven, not bass-driven. The riffs might be more minimalist than most, but not nearly to the point of Joy Division’s death jams. And while Joy Division strove for an atmosphere defined by emptiness, Joy Division’s atmosphere is positively lush at every opportunity. Just listen to tracks like Hands Away and The New and you can see an almost shoegaze-y devotion to atmosphere which is the polar opposite of what Joy Division was doing. Maybe if you played their music (and Banks’ voice) an octave lower, took out half the instruments, and boosted the bass, they would sound like a happier Joy Division, but by that point you’re adding almost all the defining aspects of Joy Division to begin with. The point is, the similarities are there only in the most superficial aspects. Clearly an influence, hardly a sole influence, definitely not enough to make Interpol somehow redundant.
As far as what this album is, as opposed to what it’s not, that’s a bit harder to characterize. But the atmosphere is important, and I think it’s what a lot of people miss when they don’t get it, and it’s what I think their new albums were really lacking on. Like I said, there’s an understated but still heavily present shoegaze influence here, not just in the atmosphere but in the song structure. There’s also a debt owed to bands like Low (who I always, oddly enough, sort of associate with shoegaze even though the wall-of-sound aspects of shoegaze are almost entirely absent) that I can’t quite put my finger on. I feel like I’m going to finish this review without actually saying much about the album itself, just touching on things that surround it. It’s hard to say something too substantial about the music itself. It’s emotional, but not overtly so. It’s kind of slow, tempo and progression-wise, but nothing to write home about. It’s fairly unique, but you can see touches of different influences all over the place.
The one really definite thing I can say about it is negative, and I don’t want to give off the impression that this isn’t a good album. But, still, the strongest distinct impression I have about it is that the lyrics are really, really bad. Inane. Ridiculous. Meaningless and not particularly aesthetically pleasing even then. A few examples:
Well she can read, she can read, she can read, she can read, she’s bad
Her stories are boring and stuff
She’s always calling my bluff”Sleep tight, grim rite, we have 200 couches where you can sleep tonight
My friend is a butcher, he has sixty knives
He carries them all over the town, at least he tries
Oh look, it stopped snowing.
It’s like they don’t even try. And I don’t particularly care, because the lyrics are clearly not the centerpiece of the album, which is built much more on the repetition of the elements of the songs themselves until, eventually, they lock into a sort of groove. The lyrics might be a part of that groove, they may not, but they provide a vocal aesthetic that’s good enough. They’re just meaningless and not even poetically pleasing, the majority of the time.
Apart from that? It’s good music, it’s fun music, it’s occasionally poignant music, and it’s addicting music. It’s definitely a grower of an album, most of the middle tracks didn’t appeal to me much at all when I first listening to it. It isn’t that the music is boring, but like I said, the songs tend to build and then they lock into a groove, and if you aren’t anticipating that or used to music that doesn’t follow a straightforward verse-chorus structure (these do, they just tend to abandon it halfway through about the time the bridge would kick in) you might be disappointed. But if you pay attention to the atmosphere, zone out a bit, and let the music be a bit more encompassing, it works out well, and the repetitive, heavily rhythmic nature of most of the songs ceases to be a turn off.
I guess that’s all I really have to say, which means this review is coming up a bit short. That’s ok, the last came out a bit long, so it all evens out. I’m going to upload The New, since it’s far and away my favorite track off the album, and a good example of the importance of atmosphere in their music.
That’s it for now. As always, comments are welcome (and, as of yet, I haven’t received any on anything, so I would like some affirmation besides wordpress traffic reports and mediafire download stats that someone out there actually reads this thing).
Long ago (about 6 years ago, give or take), when I first heard Interpol’s “Turn On the Bright Lights,” I thought it was a sweet album, but I felt that there was nothing more to it other than being a great entrance album for people who didn’t understand what indie rock was. As I’ve lived in a city for the better part of 4 years now, elements from that album popped into my head here and there, but I couldn’t understand. Now, as a music journalist, a few weeks ago (in April 2009), it all came to me: The album wasn’t a random meshing of 90′s indie-rock atrophy. It was a band making an image of New York City, the New York City outside of a few blocks that had everyone’s attention because some buildings blew up, the New York City that existed and lived as though September 11, 2001 was really just another day in the grand scheme of all things. And it was prolly NYC at its best: Before the security lockdowns, before clean-up and glamour went into overdrive, before Williamsburg became gentrified and created a cancer that is killing Brooklyn, before the hipsters were identified as the new counterculture, cannibalized, and commodified. A New York City that was, in many ways, real. But more importantly, because of this imagery, it was the last great album to symbolize a regional sound outside of hip hop, just before My Space decimated the concept of regional music. It was, very much, an album that was perfect for its time, like Michael Jackson’s Thriller. — brokenwit