At
Least One Minute Each Day
They
were prophesied as the new Joy Division of the U.S. indie rock scene
associated with gloomy baritone vocals, uniquely odd lyrics and an as
cold as concrete sound. With their 2002 debut album Turn on the
Bright Lights the New York based Interpol contributed one of the most
important pop albums of the 2000s. Their distinctive signature shines
through each song and perhaps this record carries one of the
symptomatic styles of the past decade.
by
Kilian
An
outline
These are the facts: The
band got together in Manhattan and was located around the New York
City indie scene. Lead guitarist Daniel Kessler and
bassist/keyboarder Carlos Dengler had met in a philosophy class
at New York University where Kessler studied French, film and
literature and Dengler philosophy and history. Only weeks later
singer and guitarist Paul Banks who encountered Kessler on a study abroad program in Paris joined
Interpol at the age of 19. Kessler worked for several record labels
where he socialized in the music business and expanded contacts to
other musicians. It was his major role to bring the band together and
distribute their early records. Dengler, the child of a
Colombian mother and a German father, became famous beyond his bass
playing as a Lower East Side party animal and for experimenting with
Nazi aesthetics in his clothing style. Banks and Kessler were both
born in England and moved to the United States in early childhood.
Finally drummer Samuel Fogarino joined Interpol in 2000 as oldest
band member with more than ten years of previous band
experience.
After
formation in 1997 the band had to wait five years to record their
first full length studio album until contracted with American indie
label Matador Records
in early 2002. The album had been recorded shortly before in
Connecticut at the end of 2001 with British producer Gareth Jones who
has also worked with Depeche Mode,
German industrial-experimental band
Einstürzende Neubauten,
Nick Cave
and Grizzly Bear.
It was released in the summer of
2002 with eleven tracks of three to six minutes and a full length of
49 minutes.
Turn
on the Bright Lights was recorded immediately after 9/11. It is
hard to say if the anxious, angry and paranoid atmosphere that arose
in New York and the whole United States after the largest terror
attack in U.S. history had a direct influence on the band's
creations. But in any case the feelings of wounded and confused
America parallel very much with what the band expresses. From where
we stand today it is irony of history they called themselves Interpol
back in the 90s – the organization that was (among others) assigned
to persecute Al Qaida and Bin Laden for more than ten years.
Ranged
between a revival of post-punk à la Joy Division and indie rock from
The Smith to The Strokes the record received overall critical
acclaim in professional reviews. It was highly ranked by Pitchfork
Media (#1 album of 2002, #3 album of
2000-2004 and #20 album of 2000s), Rolling
Stone (#59 album of 2000s) and New
Musical Express (#10 album of 2002 and
#8 album of 2000s).
Three
music videos were made based on the album. In NYC
eyes, ties and aeroplanes are put together on negative exposure.
Obstacle 1
impresses with a more professional editing to show the band play in a
sterile white hall interspersed with a faceless muse in a warm and
cosy hotel room writhing under gravitational and psychic compulsion.
The entanglement of building, city, technology, person, movement and
perspective then is at length climaxed in PDA.
Forty-nine
minutes
The
album opens with a monotonous one-string-riff, sombrely delayed and
resounded until a full and warm bass and light-footed drums enter. A lightning
chord is added several times to the easy composition which reminds of Led Zeppelin's 1969 hit Whole
Lotta Love. Unlike this hard rock reference Interpol's chorus and
verse are shuffled into each other. There is no repetition of the
concise lyrics (laconically in voice and words: surprise,
sometimes, will come around / I will surprise you sometime / I'll
come around). The singular
structure linearly heads for continuity. A bridge feeds into
the end which is introduced by a mean frequency guitar tone that
remains the same for many rhythmic times. Like a noisy malfunction,
an alarm signal or a menacing siren it only gains harmonic coherence
when the other instruments finally empty and weaken.
A
staccato guitar together with an overdriven barre riff then
consolidates the offensive vocal melody in the second track Obstacle
1. Paul Banks diffuse lyrics – it's
different now that I'm poor and aging, I'll never see this face again
/ you go stabbing yourself in the neck
– begin to extrapolate an indeterminate texture from lo-fi
megaphoned vocals. The singer and lyricist once admitted in an
interview that most of his lines don't make sense in a classical way.
At this point his textual output becomes even more gripping for we
have reason to assume a poetic unconscious: we
can find new ways of living make playing only logical harm / and we
can top the old times, claim-making that nothing else will change.
The
warm and thick riff guitar spins forward through the tightly
constructed 3:30 minutes of Roland
who is said to be from Poland: my best friend's a butcher,
he has sixteen knives. Matching
the sample of compact slogans Banks vocalizes the lines like
enthusiastic paroles whereas none of them contents any explicit
material of the traditional barricade speeches in whose style they
are wedged. Interpol thus are undeniably far from being a punk band
for that would originally be forced to bark aloud and earnest. In
this regard it is a certainly not unintended paradox of the musical
punk culture that it tends to make itself redundant and ludicrous and
therefore necessarily stultifies its own attitude. Instead the
post-punk revivalists of Interpol employ this established
pop-cultured pattern of short form and content to break with the
usual expectations and to ironise outdated fashions – as well as
obsolete manners of present day, too of course. But within all this
postmodern cynical distance there is still and clamantly something
serious about the lyrics. It is what I called the unconscious meaning
of poetry or its preconscious content that – abundantly
vague and blurred – must be refined from everyday experience.
Roland exemplifies what's going on in the poet's mind: he severed
segments secretly, you like that / he always took the time to speak
with me / I liked him for that / he severed segments so secretly, you
like that / he was growing on me.
If we don't consider any artistical epiphanies all of this may simply
be seen as a modern lifestyle surplus of no practical use that is transformed
into verse or prose and thereby gains the listener's appeal. We dwellers of the
contemporary westernised world are a Paul Banks taking a
narrow view of a big city.
And
hence it isn't peculiar at all that – on light ambient
instrumentation – the near and intimate chanting of Hands Away
spherically addresses some mystic meat: will you put my hands
away? / will you be my man? / serve it up, don't wait / let's see
about this ham / oh, what happened? / home spun desperation's knowing
/ inside your cover's always blown.
Another
time the catchy, impelling and monotonously rattled down riff in PDA
is preceded by moony chords that reverberate in NYC, the
album's slowest song – I had seven faces / thought I knew which
one to wear. Here, with
sparking drums a cynic ode to an unconcerned city is performed:
the subway is a porno / the pavements they are a mess / I know you've
supported me for a long time / somehow I'm not impressed / but New
York cares. The album's eponymous line appears in a lethargic
chant: it's up to me now, turn on the bright lights.
It is exactly these bright lights that Interpol turn on around
our by now ethereally buzzing
heads to bring some peace and boldness back in our messily
pornographic lives.
After
this Say Hello to the Angels is probably the most
European-influenced track of the record. It starts with an
instrumental arrangement and a vocal style that could have equally
been found on the contemporaneously released Libertines' debut album
Up the Bracket as well as it
foreshadows the Scottish Franz Ferdinand of the subsequent
years of the 2000s.
But
back to the New Yorkers' essence. Around a solid composition with the
usual Interpol sound in the seventh track (Obstacle 2)
violent and ludicrous assault is announced (I'm gonna pull you in
close / gonna wrap you up tight / gonna play with the braids that you
came here with tonight / I'm gonna hold your face, and toast the snow
that fell / because friends don't waste wine when there's words to
sell) and love is found (if you don't trust yourself for at
least one minute each day / well you should trust in this, girl,
cause loving is coming our way / if you can fix me up, girl, we'll go
a long way / take my love in real small doses / … / it took time
then I found you).
Another
bewitched and symbolically rather indecent romance is struck up with
Stella (at the bottom of the ocean she dwells / from crevices
caressed by fingers / and fat blue serpent swells / Stella I love
you) whose schizophrenic depression stresses the famous Freudian
water metaphor, i.e. the unconscious: there's something that's
invisible / there's some things you can't hide / try to detect you
when I'm sleeping / in a wave you say goodbye.
Ocean, love, water, Freud.
Enough to carry home from this song which is
the album's longest track and with
its six and a half
minutes it effortlessly absorbs the listener's attention in every
played second.
Nonetheless
Interpol's debut record doesn't manage to continue that way and can't
avoid an unfortunate disenchantment right before the outro track. A
poor relation like The New is neither booting the
album with inventively composed sound nor with a gripping
instrumental structure. The childish lyrics sum up the lax and clumsy
downside of Paul Banks poetry which is – at least this time – not
even underlined by a wink of pregnant Dada.
But
we are compensated by the cathedral outro
Leif Erikson named
after the Viking explorer who is said to be the first European to
discover North America on a trip from Iceland via Greenland around
the medieval year of 1000. It contemplatively closes the record in a
subtle and by all means honourable manner: she
says it helps with the lights out / her rabid glow is like braille to
the night.
A virtuoso chorus makes the flesh crawl
(the clock is set for nine but you know you're gonna make it eight /
so that you two can take some time, teach each other to reciprocate /
the clock is set for nine but you know you're gonna make it eight /
all the people that you've loved they're all bound to leave some
keepsakes)
until the last verse collects the album's poetic appeal set between
interline antics and unwitting insights: she
says brief things, her love's a pony / my love's subliminal.
sources of pictures
