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| Interpol – ‘Turn On The Bright Lights’. Matador. It’s 2.15 am in the city that never sleeps. Red neon lights flicker for a late movie down some newspaper strewn back alley. On the subway a junkie works over a lush for his next hit. On the rain slicked streets, needles and fast food wrappers wash down the gutter while a hunchbacked Taxi driver prowls the curb. This is the dim-lit seedy world that Interpol are born of. They are faded Hollywood stars, dark glasses in the morning, a grey Mancunian skyline of concrete high-rises and post-Thatcherite urban decay. And ‘Turn On The Bright Lights’ is the soundtrack. The songs ache of epicness, of insomnia and paranoiac sweats, lifted and buoyed by the post-punk rhythmic clanging of guitars, and weighted round the neck by Paul Banks’ detached vocals and desolately pornographic lyrics. Each song is a mesh of layers to be stripped, fucked about with and reformed before the track is over. ‘Untitled’ starts with industrial riffs that chime and build like an approaching train in the night, muffled drums that sound like they’re being played in the next room, the smell of damp and mildew on drawn curtains while it’s still daylight outside. Interpol’s balance between light and dark is a fine line they keep well. Although the sea-fog claustrophobia of the album is dense enough to be tangible and at times almost impenetrable, the odd moment flips on the headlights – ‘Say Hello To The Angels’ skips and dances like Morrissey high on anti-hay fever tablets, the kinetic up to the distraught and insular down of ‘Hands Away’. ‘Roland’ is a schizophrenic tale of butcher’s knives and friends from Poland, the poetical and not always literal lyrics drive images deep into your skull and hammer them there to stay. There are the obligatory comparisons to make. now. ‘PDA’ takes you straight to 1979 and Joy Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control’. Every cry of hopelessness in Paul’s voice recalls the late Curtis. Elsewhere in the album you can find grey shades of The Smiths, Echo And The Bunnymen, Slint, Gang Of Four, Wire, etc etc. But enough of band naming. It would be stupid to dismiss this band as nothing but derivative, to assume that they’ve just come from the right place at the right time. In many ways they are much like The Strokes: sharply dressed, highly photogenic, heads stuck in the past and yet, like their New York comrades, they still come away as being so much more than just lucky chancers playing at being a tribute band. It’s hard to define what marks a band out as special, but whatever it is, Interpol have it shining out of every pore. As a lonely man steps out of an all night café and turns his trench coat up against the chill of the wind and calls over the hunchback taxi driver, the sound of ‘NYC’ is playing somewhere in the background. You need this album like oxygen. Rachel. |
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