Top 25 Albums Of The Decade (#15)

15) INTERPOL – Turn On The Bright Lights (2002)

WHENI’MFEEELINGLAZYIT’SPROBABLYBECAUSE I’MSAVINGALLMYENERGYTOPICKUPWHENYOU MOVE-INTO-MY-AIR SPACE!.... MOVE-INTO-MY-AIR SPACE! Okay: the lyrics on this album blow. Mostly. For every “I’m sick of spending my lonely nights training myself not to care” there’s a “she can read, she can read,” or a “she puts the weights into my little heart” that sends me this close to comedic aneurysm. I’ll take Liberal-hating oratory over this pseudo-artsy bullshit any day of the week (see: Type O Negative). “The subway is a porno.” Really? Really? In what way is the subway a porno? Because there are stupid ads all over the place? Because perverts in trenchcoats are secretly jerking off in the back? Because the women all flash come-hither looks even though they probably wouldn’t let you touch them with Orlando Bloom’s dick? Help me out here, guys. It’s not surprising that the most emotionally-affecting song on the whole album is the one where Paul Banks sounds like he’s singing with marbles in his mouth (“Untitled”), or that the third-best song on the album (the closer “Leif Erikson”) is called, inexplicably, “Leif Erikson.” So then… does it matter? Would Turn On The Bright Lights rank higher on this list if the lyrics had been written by, say, Leonard Cohen? After a half-second’s thought, my answer is a solid: No. Not at all. So why did I spend half of this review bitching about failed metaphors? Because I’m trying to make a point (I just remembered that I’d been trying to make a point), that the aesthetic of an album has NOTHING to do with words—even if you’re secretly laughing at them. Would the music of Agalloch still transport us to the frigid lodges of the Pacific Northwest if John Haughm was singing about real estate trade journals? Of course it would. And thus Interpol still sends us rambling down NYC backstreets on those detached winter evenings when it gets dark at 4:30pm, crafting a sadness so honed that it makes you intentionally come up with things to mope about.