Guitarist Daniel Kessler is the album's unsung hero, expanding the band's dynamic range by oscillating between wide, monolithic chords and narrow, winding leads. Drummer Sam Fogarino is the perfect anchor for Carlos Dengler's busy, melodic bass lines, keeping the rhythm section forceful and grounded. These songs are packed with a staggering amount of rhythmic and melodic tension, sometimes amplifying minuscule expressive nuances in Banks's voice, and sometimes drawing attention to their disconcerting absence.Įach individual member of the band has his own role in piecing this puzzle together.

But from this insistent, exaggerated blankness, the band coaxed a genuinely unnerving sense of alienation and melancholy. Banks's words can be downright laughable on paper, and are often sung as if WRITTEN OUT IN ALL CAPS WITH NO PUNCTUATION. While Joy Division could channel enormous amounts of energy through Ian Curtis's intense delivery, Interpol pulled off a real magic trick by constructing a framework complex and dynamic enough to bring singer Paul Banks' inscrutable deadpan to life. In the intervening years, other bands have sounded a whole lot more like Joy Division, and the comparison now feels like just that: a comparison. 'Interpol sounds like Joy Division' was one of the first critical observations to turn into a full-fledged meme. In retrospect, 2002 may have been the very year that we stopped talking about how music sounds, and started talking about what other music it sounds like. This stellar 10th Anniversary reissue documents the process by which a handful of pretty-good songs became a truly great album, making it painfully and unequivocally clear that Turn on the Bright Lights is the sum of its players, not its influences. It is a crushingly real place, rendered in such vivid emotional detail that it rings true even to those who have never set foot in the city. It is a darker and more complicated place, fraught with disappointment and disconnection. But the early-aughts New York of Turn on the Bright Lights is not the young, vibrant, and impossibly cool place of cultural myth. We are called Cause and Effect, on Thursday nights from 7 - 9.On the surface, the story of Interpol's 2002 full-length debut Turn on the Bright Lights is almost annoyingly of its place and time: four guys meet in New York, start a band, make tightly-wound indie rock jams that sound great at your favorite mid-gentrification Williamsburg bar, sign to a renowned independent label, and the rest is history. Summary: Weekly on 97.3 here in Richmond, Virginia and on we focus on one band and trace their influences, side projects, their previous bands, and lastly play bands that are both within their peer group or influenced by them. Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)

Interpol turn on the bright