Interpol's "Turn on the Bright Lights"

 

                What’s up guys. Welcome to a new week where I talk about a project I haven’t listened to before. This week I’m going to be talking about an album that’s been out for a while, but I haven’t had a chance to delve into this particular artist. The artist is Interpol and the album will be their debut album “Turn on the Bright Lights” that came out in 2002. The reason I wanted to listen to them was due to my newfound love for the Strokes. I started getting really into alternative rock, and I remember that one song that I associated to my college years was “Rest My Chemistry”. I remember first listening to it from the speaker of my roommates, and when I asked who this was, he told me “Interpol, they’re fire.” So here I am, and I gotta say that this band is indeed fire.

                The album starts off with a great intro in my opinion. The song “Untitled” has few words coming from Paul Banks but the impression from the instrumental is enough to know that this band isn’t a small deal. The phases of sounds that come from this song show off a great amount of skill from all the band members, and from there we go into “Obstacle 1”. The name of this song is weird but allows more personal flavor into these songs as they come with special meanings. For “Obstacle 1 and 2”, the band admit that these songs were products of them getting out of a phase of writer’s block. The song sounds amazing even when it illustrates dark themes such as a model’s suicide in this case. From this point in the album, I already got the sense that this album was much darker in topic and style compared to the Strokes. The lyrics were much more ambiguous in meaning and it made me actually have to look at Genius to get an idea at what I was reading. Songs like “NYC”, “Say Hello to the Angels”, “Hands Away”, “Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down”, “Roland”, and “Leif Erikson” each go over a lot of mature concepts that range from the attitudes of New York post 9/11, erotic obsessions, and murder.

The dark tonality of the album is very much apparent, but it’s how Interpol does it that makes me impressed. Besides the lyrical content, the titles, and the instrumentals, there seems to be a certain atmosphere created for each song that furthers the feelings created in each song. For example, the song “Roland” is about a butcher who was also a murderer, but the song takes the perspective of a friend of the butcher. Even though Roland committed these crimes, the narrator still likes him because Roland was such a great friend and listener. I started the song not caring about the story the narrator had to share, but at the end I wanted to give him a hug after hearing his grieving over his serial killer friend. The story is random, but everything else is filled with purpose as the band knows when to stop playing, when to start playing, when to let Banks sing alone, and when the instruments should do the singing for them.

Overall, this album was impressive, and I can see why there were a lot of praises for it. I don’t know what I would rate this album, but I did enjoy listening to it. Thanks for reading, I hope you all have a great week!

 

Favorite Songs: Untitled, Obstacle 1, NYC, Hands Away, Obstacle 2, Roland, The New, Leif Erikson