A few weeks ago, I looked up a song on YouTube, got busy with something else, and inadvertently let the algorithm run. When I started paying attention again, a new Interpol song was playing. Realizing both that I hadn't listened to them since their debut and that the new song reminded me of the Afghan Whigs, I decided to play catch-up on both of their respective discographies.
After I listened to various records from both bands over the next few days, I found myself returning to that first Interpol more than any of the others. Soon, it was the only one I was listening to -- and I haven't stopped.
Turn on the Bright Lights (Matador Records) came out exactly twenty years before my recent kick began. Plagued by comparisons to Joy Division, Interpol's debut is rich with many other veiled and not-so-veiled influences. The shoe-gazing tendencies of Ride and My Bloody Valentine, a jaunty bounce more akin to Echo and the Bunnymen or the Doors than to their contemporaries the Strokes, and a post-punk gloom Ian Curtis could only dream of are all inherent in the early Interpol. Recorded as it was in November of 2001, 9/11 also hangs heavy over the record.
Interpol emerged from an odd New York indie-rock, post-punk revival, a scene that included TV on the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the National, and the aforementioned Strokes. Theirs was a rich crop, not too unlike the CBGB bands of a previous era, bands like New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground, Suicide, Blondie, Television, and Talking Heads. Interpol's beginnings were in the waning days of the compact disc, when downloading MP3s was still new, and bandwidth wasn't yet wide enough enable streaming, before smartphones and social media splintered fanbases into ever and ever smaller niches. Their scene may be the last of its kind.
Though the band had written the songs on Turn on the Bright Lights long before 9/11, they have acknowledged that new meanings emerged afterwards. For instance, the song "NYC" seems to be about New York specifically after 9/11, and as Paul Banks sings on "Obstacle 1," "It's different now that I'm poor and aging / I'll never see this place again." These are laments for a time and a place that's never coming back. This is the sound of that sense of loss.
Publicist UK's 2015 debut, Forgive Yourself (Relapse Records) is the other record that I think of immediately in the midst of this rediscovery. Publicist UK is the merging of members of Municipal Waste, Discordance Axis, Revocation, Goes Cube, and several other bands. Where Interpol's debut conjured lazy comparisons to Ian Curtis and Joy Division, Publicist UK's brings to mind Andrew Eldritch and Sisters of Mercy. Like Turn on the Bright Lights (I'm finding), Forgive Yourself is one of those records I get stuck on for weeks. And like Interpol's Paul Banks, Publicist UK's Zachary Lipez is a writer, a post-punk poet masquerading as a rock lyricist. His pen drops lines like "You’re a knife in a world of cutters" from "I Wish You'd Never Gone to School" and "Pain’s a secret no one keeps / You’re the lie that I believe" from "Levitate the Pentagon," as well as the following from "Cowards":
We were born to lick boots
And pretend it was steak
It’s not hard in this world
To love what you hate
Post-punk has always been more lenient than its punk precursor. It's a genre more forgiving of experimentation, more tolerant of outside influences. Where, as Andy Greenwald once pointed out [1], punk is a cul-de-sac, post-punk is more of a wide, windy road. At its commercial peak in 1979, it included the angular and atonal guitars of Gang of Four, Public Image Limited, and Wire, the damaged pop of Joy Division, Talking Heads, and Devo, and the gothic drama of The Cure, Sisters of Mercy, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Like most genres, there's an invisible thread that loosely unites these bands, an unseen aesthetic that links them. That same thread stretches from post-punk's origins over four decades ago, through Interpol to Publicist UK, and beyond.
Interpol may never outdo their debut, and I may never know what's so alluring about it, but I suspect it has something to do with that post-punk thread. As much guff as they got for peddling plagiarism, Interpol had clones of their own. The early 2000s owe a lot to them, their scene, and their debut album. [2]
Thank you for reading this one-off Sunday-evening edition. Our regular newsletter schedule will resume next week.
There's a Big Release coming on Tuesday! I'm so excited!
More soon,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com
See Andy Greenwald, Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo, New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2003, pp. 147-148.
This piece benefited greatly from discussions with my friends Natalie Baltierra and Nicole Nesmith.