Interpol: Turn On The Bright Lights

INTERPOL: TURN ON THE BRIGHT LIGHTS (2002)

1) Untitled; 2) Obstacle 1; 3) NYC; 4) PDA; 5) Say Hello To The Angels; 6) Hands Away; 7) Obstacle 2; 8) Stella Was A Diver And She Was Always Down; 9) Roland; 10) The New; 11) Leif Erikson.

General verdict: If this is indeed one of the best indie rock albums of the 2000s, this explains the nichization of rock music more transparently than any other case study.

In the early and still somewhat optimistic years of the 21st century, God made a plan to save rock music — again — because rock music was apparently in need of saving — again. The plan was quick, rough, and impulsive, as should befit any plan dealing with rock music, and involved the usual three steps. Step 1: The Strokes lead an initial Panzer attack and take the world by surprise with their rejuvenated brand of garage punk, just like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols did 25 years before. Step 2: Interpol arrive with heavy infantry reinforcements and assuage the dazzled world with their reintellectualized brand of post-punk, just like Joy Division and the Cure did 25 years before. Step 3: Fuck knows what, itʼs all supposed to auto-pilot itself to Heaven.

Reading back on all sorts of stuff that has been written about the first albums by these bands and the general history of indie-rock in the first five years of the 21st century, you could almost make yourself believe that Godʼs plan totally succeeded. Many retro-reviews of Turn On The Bright Lights, in particular, still praise the record as a blissful poetic and musical revelation, almost singlehandedly responsible for the indie-rock revival of the 2000s — in the wake of Interpolʼs success came The National, Deerhunter, Arcade Fire, and tons of lesser artists to serve as trendy contemporary deities for young millennial hipsters with dark and sensitive hearts (the ones with bright and hedonistic hearts would rather have their choice of Strokes, Hives, and Vines). The album has definitely become part of the canon for rockʼs twilight years (I think we could safely reserve that term for the 2000s, since «rock music» as such in the 2010s has pretty much become relegated to museum exhibits and revival carnivals), and will most likely continue to be respected as long as millennials still have a voice in forming consensus.

Whether the record is really all that valuable if you do place it in the overall context of musical history rather than personal nostalgia is, however, quite a different matter. Over the course of quite a few listens — many more than the minimum requirement of three that I usually demand from myself to write about anything — there was never even one second during which I would find my senses in ecstasy, and quite a few seconds (and minutes) during which I would find myself in a state of terminal boredom. To my ears, this era of Interpol is characterized, above and beyond everything else, by barely-bearably lazy songwriting. The typical formula for an Interpol song is as follows: «find one chord — play it in staccato mid-tempo mode — stick to it for about three or four minutes — put some monotonous and emotionally drained vocals on top of it — rinse and repeat ten or eleven times». Sounds familiar?

To be fair, this is a formula that occasionally could work, and itʼs not as if the abovementioned Joy Division or Cure would always rise above it themselves. The problem is, I am still at a total loss when trying to understand what it is that Paul Banks and his not-so-merry band of young New Yorkers are actually adding to it. Subtracting, sure; adding, not so sure. Everything about this set of songs screams «competence»; not a single thing screams «genius». Heck, not even a single thing screams «so well adapted to the values of the 2000s!», though maybe that last one is actually a good thing, because at least the record still sounds relatively timeless 18 years later (unlike, say, Franz Ferdinand).

As an example, let us focus (as hard as it is) on ʽPDAʼ, the first single from the album. Like most other songs here, it is a mid-tempo rocker with all the musical complexity of a Ramones song but none of the Ramonesʼ humor and self-irony. Lyrically, it establishes its grim seriousness pretty much immediately with the opening line "yours is the only version of my desertion that I could ever subscribe to" (whatever that means) and confirms it with the chorus of "we have two hundred couches where you can sleep tight, grim rite" (I wonder why they didnʼt hire David Lynch to make the video for the song). But musically, the only thing that goes on is an incessant monotonous strum — which does gain a little intensity as they head into the coda, but certainly not enough to make me feel that they are doing anything even remotely interesting with those guitars. And what sort of atmosphere is the song trying to convey? Darkness? Desperation? Cold resignation? The vocals are so utterly bland and the guitar lines are so completely generic that the song just passes by without tickling a single nerve in my body.

Another example — second single, ʽObstacle 1ʼ. Here you could make an interesting comparison, because the second of the songʼs two interlocking riffs, the repetitive two-chord strum, is a clear (even if subconscious) nod to Televisionʼs ʽMarquee Moonʼ, making it clear who these guysʼ principal role models are; and indeed, both songs strive to create a similar atmosphere, conveying a sense of emotional frustration in some restricted environment. But ʽMarquee Moonʼ actually uses that two-chord strum (opening the song) as a foundation, a base pulse around which the second, relatively complicated, swirling second riff winds around — not to mention the snapping, venomous vocals which tell you not to fuck around with the hero. In ʽObstacle 1ʼ, the two-chord strum arrives later and is actually the compositionʼs «lead» element; eventually, they start playing around with both riffs and trying to develop them in different directions, but the opening minute is disappointingly wasted, and the weak vocals offer little assistance — itʼs like somebody is desperately trying to get angry about something, but since heʼs actually got nothing serious to get angry about, the effort is not convincing.

What about something faster? ʽSay Hello To The Angelsʼ, for instance, whose main riff was actually shamelessly stolen by Arcade Fire for the coda to ʽWake Upʼ? (In all honesty, though, that is such an obvious riff, it must have been used in at least a couple dozen pop-rock songs before, I just canʼt unscramble them in my head right now). Formally, itʼs energetic, but where are the hooks? Are they supposed to be lodged somewhere within the "you move into my air space" chorus? But it is merely a case of raising the volume a little, there is nothing non-trivial or surprising, no real build-up, no classy melodic resolutions, just nothing: a perfect example of how to do a fast rock song with zero new ideas.

You can easily extrapolate all these comments on most of the rest of these songs. Like so many revered (or not revered) albums from its era, what Turn On The Bright Lights really does is cut out a small chunk of the legacy of one or two established acts of the past and then amplify that chunk to the extent that, if we want to really enjoy it, we have to force ourselves to distinguish between the slightest and subtlest of nuances. For all the comparisons to Ian Curtis, and for all the thematic and atmospheric homogeneity of Joy Division songs, I do not remember Joy Division starting every second song of theirs with the same repetitive «ching ching ching ching ching ching ching ching» pattern — their guitar lines could borrow from the arsenals of just about anybody from The Doors to Black Sabbath, and whatʼs even more important, they never sounded like a bunch of well-meaning school kids afraid to seriously crank it up because the headmaster could come along at any moment and throw them out of the rehearsal hall. Post-punk really does not work all that well on tranquilizers, and it honestly sounds as if these guys were popping them down by the dozen during recording sessions.

All in all, though, Turn On The Bright Lights is a pretty important record because it gives a very clear explanation — well, one of many possible and non-mutually excluding explanations — to why the 2000s finally spelt out the death of rock music as a major captivating form of artistic expression. Over several previous decades, there was always this feel that rock music can be revived by stripping itself from its accumulated excesses and going back to its roots. It worked in the late 1970s, it worked well enough in the early 1990s — but this record demonstrates why it didnʼt really work in the early 2000s, even if, for a while, some people thought (or at least pains­takingly tried to convince themselves) that it did. The thing is, if you do not really put out, 100%, there is no sense in putting out at all. Turn On The Bright Lights — and, alas, a lot of second-hand indie rock that it inspired — is a derivative, unimaginative, limp, hookless mess with some pretense to intellectualism (mainly due to Paul Banksʼ intentionally enigmatic but, frankly, not too engaging lyrics) that simply has no reason to exist unless we previously burn down every little thing that our forefathers have left for us in the New Wave era.

Of course, Turn On The Bright Lights is not even Interpolʼs best record (though it will be pretty hard to convince people otherwise, given its well-canonized status); of course, 2000s indie rock cannot be reduced to its influence and imitations; and it goes without saying that Interpol were hardly the inventors of this bland, boring, faux-intellectualized rock sound, what with second-rate post-punk bands being there on the scene from the day that post-punk was born. They simply happened to be one of the first second-rate rock bands of the 21st century to be promoted as first-rate — helping establish a new, lowered-expectation standard for the genre that looks so pathetic in the overall historical context. Alas, the fact that they seemingly had no competition for that standard in 2002 — and, come to think of it, they still donʼt have much of a competition as late as 2020 — sort of speaks for itself.