Interpol

Think of the start of the last decade and the mind goes straight there: New York, the smoking ruins of Ground Zero, the light of the 2000s' progressive fate fading into an immense, muffled twilight, dotted with fires at sunset. It's into this atmosphere that Interpol drop us with their debut album and an untitled song, where the voice is almost submerged by a sound that is a cloud of black soot, of dull grief. Soon, in the dim light, the outline of a city appears, "New York Cares", for a ballad that manages to open up in the chorus "it's up to me now, turn on the bright lights", so that suddenly the night comes alive again, the city rises once more.

It's hard to explain just how fitting "Turn On The Bright Lights" sounded during those months of mourning, and the resurgence of a New York brought to its knees by a mortal blow, or to describe how Paul Banks's baritone sounded almost healing in 2002, like a bitter medicine that was nonetheless necessary. Nearly ten years on, Interpol are still around, but they're an ordinary band now; back then, they were the right band at the right time, and "Turn On The Bright Lights" was an exorcism of fear.

It's also true that rock itself was starting over from its own (far more modest) tabula rasa, given that the genre's main standard-bearers, Radiohead, had decided to blow it up, right at the turn of the millennium, in the icy amniotic fluid of a new beginning, "Kid A". Rather than follow them into the gorgeous darkness of cyberspace, 2000s rock chose instead to return to the far more reassuring, human sound of good old guitars: and in the beginning there were the Strokes. With their debut, New York was put back at the center of the map, rock rose again, and people started talking once more about garage and new wave (there's the dreaded word), about lean, no-frills rock reminiscent of the late Seventies-early Eighties, as if electronic music had been nothing but a bad dream. And yet it's the Strokes who would be set aside by History, in the luminous interlude between New Year's Eve 2001 and the burning towers of September.

New York is alive and starting anew with countless bands united by an urgency that is the true hallmark of all the city's heroes, this time expressed in surprising forms: spare, nervous music, sometimes tinged with a dated kind of electronics, evoking broken computers and old video games (electroclash), other times decidedly rock, but always under the banner of an incurably Eighties disposition.

So here are Interpol: Paul Banks (vocals), Daniel Kessler (guitar), Carlos Dengler (bass), Sam Fogarino (drums). At first they seem like a darker version of the Strokes, with the overwhelming assaults of "Obstacle 1" and "Say Hello To The Angels", built entirely on the interlocking interplay of the two guitars and driven by a powerful rhythm section, with a booming, tactile bass always pushed well forward in the mix.

For the Strokes, critics had invoked Television and Velvet Underground, that is, the New York new wave of the Seventies and its own inspirations. This time, though, there's a detached baritone voice, layers of reverb on the guitars, a shadowy, dramatic atmosphere, and it doesn't take long to say Joy Division. Listening to a "Roland" as rough and black as the rocks of Manchester, rich in plays of shadow, it's impossible to avoid the comparison that will haunt the New Yorkers for the rest of their lives (I suspect that if you brought up Ian Curtis's band to them today, they might actually kill you).

But the rest of the record is enough to show that the web of influences is much broader (staying in Manchester for a moment, does anyone remember the Chameleons?), and that, despite this, Interpol manage to transcend a fundamentally mannerist, referential approach through a good dose of class and feeling. What really makes the difference is Kessler's style, weaving a web of hypnotic, recurring riffs through every track, now hard and searing, now ethereal, always with a sense of measure, yet never holding back the twists or shying away from burning through ideas: between the opening of "PDA" and the final echoes of its long coda, there's far more going on than in any Joy Division song, evoking instead the legacy of American indie, from Sonic Youth and the like, but also shoegaze and psychedelia.

What keeps the specter of revivalism at bay (another dreaded label they'll carry with them) are gorgeous ballads like "Untitled" and "NYC", where the guitars sound like keyboards, Radiohead-style, or simply acoustic in the manner of Rem, and where, above all, the band shows it has heart and a desire to tell small stories of urban decay. This is where the lights come up and Interpol become easy to love.

Then there's "Hands Away", a dark gem that wins over both the new-indie exegetes and the English-wave nostalgics alike, where light slowly implodes into a red glow of love. It's Banks's fragility in these moments that makes Interpol feel real, conveying bewilderment and passion, the feverish quest of a flaneur through the streets of a city sunk in an apparently eternal night. "Hands Away" is a pearl made of almost nothing, ticking guitars and a drape of mournful keyboards raised against a black backdrop. Faced with a song like this, one has to question the critical urge to systematize everything, an urge that would breed lasting skepticism toward the entire new-wave strand spawned by "Turn On The Bright Lights": in the end, this is simply beautiful music full of dark feeling, decidedly out of time and yet, as noted, still current on an emotional level.

The second half of the record, once the charge of "Obstacle 2" has passed, partly lays down its arms and recites its epic tales starting with the watery poem of "Stella Was A Diver". Here Kessler is at his peak, in a waltz of ascending riffs and abyssal stillness that seems to stretch on forever: when the rhythm section lets go, he raises his crystalline mantra like a flame stretching upward in search of air, then the rhythm picks back up and everyone plunges headlong into the darkness again. Like "PDA", "Stella..." reveals the band's psychedelic streak, quite far from the minimalism of Joy Division and Wire, which plays out in the long, wonderful codas of these songs. Here too Banks rides the flow, tenderly repeating the epitaph for his girl and for love itself, "she went down down down into the sea".

The ultimate delirium comes with "The New", which opens semi-acoustic and mournful, with Dengler's bass riff as melodic and full of personality as ever, before giving way to the young singer in a confessional mood ("I can't pretend I need to defend some part of me from you"). The song truly comes alive, though, when Kessler detonates it with a dissonant intervention, dragging it into a sob of reverb where the melody, and the mind along with it, get completely lost for a few minutes.

We end up with a solemn farewell from Banks in the guise of "Leif Erickson", fearless traveler of oceans of ice, once again trying to pry open the doors of perception (or the darkest room of hell) for one last expedition beyond the night. Then Kessler lights one final fire on his side, and silence returns.

The day that follows the night of "Turn On The Bright Lights" comes with rather uncertain light: the band gets crowned as figurehead of a movement as varied as the new wave that inspired it, one that increasingly positions itself as the new pop-rock of the 2000s. If in the Eighties bands like Wire or the Chameleons were proudly alternative, now the wave is reborn in a decidedly sweetened, more melodic form, so much so that "Turn On The Bright Lights", by comparison with many other records of the genre, sounds dark and hard to digest.

In the 2000s, the tough stuff lives elsewhere, and the new-wave strand gets adopted by the masses as a vaguely more indie antidote to the consoling anthems of Coldplay. Interpol thus find themselves confronting, in a single album (their second, "Antics"), the same growing pains that bands like Cure or U2 had worked through across three or four albums, and they quickly fall into the same trap of "stadium" sound that had marked the late-Eighties wave.

In the process the band loses itself a little, and things won't get any better from then on, despite handfuls of fine songs scattered across all their subsequent records. Meanwhile England answers back with the success of Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, confirming the curse of a string of great debuts followed by half-hearted follow-ups. In recent years Interpol have almost seemed to be outdone at their own game by a band from Ohio, The National, similar to them but far more decisively and proudly maximalist, aiming for a grandeur that, given the starting point of Kessler and Banks's band, was actually harder to reach.

In short, the new wave of the 2000s was fun and rightly kept the flag of rock flying high for a whole audience unaware of more experimental trends, but it also left plenty of room for doubt. Listening back to "Turn On The Bright Lights" today, though, those doubts vanish, and once again we rediscover a beautiful, necessary album.

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04/09/2011