Interpol: Turn on the Bright Lights (10th Anniversary Edition)

Interpol: Turn on the Bright Lights (10^th Anniversary Edition).  Matador Records, 2012.

Repackaging records after merely ten years seems like a possible exercise in over-crediting their influence and importance, which might be de rigeur in our over-excitable age of blogs and Pitchfork retrospectives on the genius of the 00’s.  Or, if you are really cynical, it seems like a mad grab for cash.  When Matador announced a deluxe, tenth-anniversary reissue of Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights (originally released in August, 2002), both possibilities came to mind immediately.  While the band (still treading the boards, albeit without bassist Carlos Dengler) might not be in desperate need of a cash injection, their legacy and luster has faded some after a few years of solo projects and critical disinterest in the later records.  But there’s a third possibility: sometimes, even though it’s only been ten years, reissues like this are worthy of the consideration because they are important enough to warrant the new treatment.  Reissuing a record that went gold is NOT the equivalent of crate-digging and exposing lost gems to the world (we leave this to labels like Numero Group and Light in the Attic) but a nicely comprehensive package like this one serves to remind us that this is a stunningly well-crafted record that both represents the time and place of its genesis (post 9/11 New York can’t help but play a part in the sound and feel of this record) yet also has a timelessness that makes it seem less like a nostalgia trip and more like something new, if familiar.

Begin with the package itself: the original album occupies disc one, and it is remastered, although nothing about the remaster is noticeably different, soundwise, from the original version.  Kudos to Matador for not ‘brickwalling’ the reissues, and amping up the loudness.  All of the nuances in the music (notably the jangling of Daniel Kessler’s guitars, the hyperactive bass work of Carlos Dengler, and the snare-heavy drumwork of Sam Fogarino) are still very present.  The second disc features a pair of b-sides (the inconsequential “Interlude” and the amazing “The Specialist” which, inexplicably, didn’t make the album itself), followed by 11 demo recordings, six of them of songs that made it onto the record.  The demos are extremely well recorded, and lack the lo-fi quality that usually lingers over commercially released demos.  In part, credit might be given to Interpol’s professionalism, because it seems like a great deal of effort was put into the recording and mixing of all of the demos (recorded in 1998, 1999, and 2001) and polishing the songs to a shine.  Notably, “Get the Girls/Song 5” has an aggressively upbeat surf guitar riff, but finds it married to some strangled Frank Black-esque screaming and squealing, and opens with an echoed set of screams that seem to be piped in from a Pixies song.  While the production of Peter Katis certainly highlights all of the best aspects of Interpol’s music, the demos clearly show that the band already knew how they wanted the record to sound before hooking up with their producer. The album itself was recorded at Tarquin Studios by Katis, who went on to further acclaim by producing albums by the National (Alligator and Boxer), The Swell Season, Fanfarlo, Frightened Rabbit, The Twilight Sad, We Were Promised Jetpacks, and Jonsi.  Four songs from a John Peel session close the second disc.  The third disc, a DVD, features eight live songs from two shows (a 2000 show in New York and a 2002 show in LA) along with the commercial videos from “NYC”, “PDA”, and “Obstacle 1”.  The packaging is beautiful, housing the whole thing in a sturdy book-pack with the original cover art intact.  The booklet inside features a host of new photos, including the beautiful quasi-minimalist gig fliers that began to attract attention during the band’s ascent in the Manhattan scene, and appropriately detailed liner notes on the recordings.  The discs are housed, in the back of the package, in the three card sleeve holders.

What of the music, then? The standard claim of lazy music journalists is that Interpol sounds very much like Joy Division, but that’s simply not the case.  In the early 00’s, as ‘indie’ or ‘alternative’ rock began to turn its attention to post-punk, Joy Division would be a useful reference, for musical credibility’s sake.  But, aside from having powerful baritone frontmen, there’s little of the Joy Division sound in Interpol.  And even the singers are markedly different: Interpol’s Paul Banks (who, for the record, has always reminded me more of Patrick Fitzgerald, of the underappreciated shoegaze combo Kitchens of Distinction) is a better pure singer than Ian Curtis, with more range and more technical prowess, but Curtis’s intensity exceeds almost any singer from any era.   There’s a detached coolness, a New York indifference, to Banks’s delivery that would not fit with the exposed nerves of any Joy Division song.  More importantly, though, is the bass, the backbone of much of the post-punk era bands (see: Gang of Four, PiL, etc) and those influenced by those bands.  Carlos D’s bass playing is much more groove-oriented and, dare to say, funky that the highly melodic bass ‘lead’ played by Peter Hook in Joy Division.  The guitars (by Daniel Kessler and Banks) take a more prominent place than in any Joy Division song, from the shoegazer-inflected lead in “Untitled 1” or the mild jangle in “Hands Away.”  There’s a nursery rhyme gentleness to “The New” that would never cut it in a Joy Division song, much less in the works of most of the other post punk revivalists of the early oughts.  Where Joy Division was all exposed nerves and repressed angst, there’s a heart on the sleeve in the songs on this record, even when the lyrics don’t clearly offer said heart.

Of course, when your lyrics include couplets like “her stories are boring and stuff/she’s always calling my bluff” (from “Obstacle 1”), you run the risk of being remembered for the wrong thing, but there’s an odd sense of appropriateness to the lyricism in the songs.  Much like the vocals in early R.E.M. songs, where the words themselves mean less than the ways they sound against the backdrop, the lyrics, even when nonsensical, just seem to fit.  Banks has a nice sense of repetition, often letting phrases or words come back again and again, attaching them to melodies in fascinating ways.  And when the lyrics are direct, they are often unsettlingly threatening (“When she walks down the street/she knows there’s people watching/the building fronts are just fronts/to hide the people watching her” in “Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down” and “The subway is a porno/the pavements they are a mess” in “NYC”) but still willfully obscure.

I’m sure there will be quite a few people who will object to re-buying an album ten years later, but this reissue package is certainly worth the investigation for those who either missed the Interpol boat the first time, or for those who want to reinvestigate a record that has languished on their shelf (or hard drive) for a few years, or for those whose tastes are driven by an album’s placement on Pitchfork’s Top 200 records of the 2000’s (it was #20, by the way), or for the completist who want to have the demos, b-sides, and live footage.  It’s a gorgeous package, priced reasonably, and still one of the strongest albums of the 2000’s.  For my money, it’s a better record than Is This It by the Strokes (#7 on Pitchfork’s list, by the way) which, on its own, is a pretty good little record.