Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights

Ok, I'll just come out and say it: Joy Division. It's an unavoidable comparison. Joy Division, Joy Division, Joy Division. That's what they all say. They wouldn't say that, of course, if Interpol frontman Paul Banks sounded like, say, Jeff Buckley, but he doesn't. He sounds like Ian Curtis. There are vast differences between the two bands; where Joy Division revelled in the negative spaces created by sparse instrumentation and song structures, Interpol's sound is big and wide and fleshy, filled with reverberations and numerous limber changes within each song, a brilliant and totally engaging sound. But front and center sits Banks's voice, gothic and metallic, a mannered baritone that could have only been patterned after one man in rock and roll. It's the most immediately striking element of Turn on the Bright Lights, and I can see how some would dismiss them as a copycat band.

Look one level deeper, though, and you'll see that Banks is up to something quite different, if not altogether more interesting. He says things that Curtis would never even think, much less sing about. "I'm sick of spending these lonely nights training myself not to care," he sings on "NYC," and later, in the album-titling lyric, "It's up to me now to turn on the bright lights." There's alienation in that line, to be sure, but not bottomless despair. On "PDA," Banks could be adressing Curtis personally when he sings, "You are the only person completely certain there's nothing here to be into." For Curtis, the bright lights never existed at all. Joy Division's entire songbook is dedicated to painting as bleak and hopeless a vision of the world as possible, making for great dark punk, and an intimate portrait of a singularly tortured man, but listening to too much of the band at once can leave one in a nihilistic haze, ready to hate anything. It's not the healthiest of music. Interpol, on the other hand, stops just short of being depressing. That's not to say that they lack conviction, or that the lyric sheet isn't just as fascinating, but the music here is energizing and life affirming, even while being moody. "PDA" is a straight, pumping rock song, and where Curtis would have filled such a sound with impassioned pleas to know why everything is shit, Banks slyly sings, "You're so cute when you're frustrated, my dear." It's a bitter love song, you see, in the vein of Afghan Whigs.

The music recalls a lot of bands, actually, as it passes through corridors and doorways, as bridges give way to clipped choruses which bleed seamlessly into codas. It's not so much catchy as it is involving, and the record recalls OK Computer from time to time, putting crunching rock into little poetic stanzas. Consider the excellently titled "Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down," which starts out a little muddled, with a few too many layers piled on top of each other, and then strips itself down to make way for the lean and lengthy bridge, then the first part of a multi-layered chorus begins, and gets a little leaner, and finally the central refrain of three words repeated over and over, "She broke away broke away," over a chill-inducing pulse of heavy guitar. And then as the anthemic melody line stands alone, it is joined by... vibraphone? Yes, and it's nothing less than thrilling. Turn on The Bright Lights is packed with such moments, like the from-New-York-to-Manchester-and-back structure of "Say Hello to the Angels," or the moment when "NYC" breaks open to reveal its soaring low-rock purpose, sounding no less revelatory than Bedhead.

Article Author: Kenan Hebert

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