Turn On The Bright Lights (Interpol)

All right, if you couldn't tell already, I'm going to be reviewing the album Turn On The Bright Lights, which was made by the band Interpol. To be honest, when I got this album and got told I should do it for my first review, I was like meh, OK, but since I was going to review it, I decided I needed to find out a bit more about this band to give you a proper introduction to what we're dealing with. So let's get started. Interpol are an indie rock and post-punk revival band from New York City, and the line up for the band when the album was being made was made up of Paul Banks on vocals and guitar, Daniel Kessler on guitar and vocals, and Sam Fogarino on drums and percussion. The band was started in 1997, and is still making music as we speak. Turn On The Bright Lights was their debut album that the band released during August 2002, and got high amounts of praise from critics, including Allmusic, PopMatters, and Pitchfork Media. And now we're going to see how well this album sounds to me, so let's just get started now shall we?

Interpol's current line up, or a past line up, or
just one of Interpol's line ups as far as I know.

So as you know if you've actually read my first blog post, I'm going to review the actual musical elements of the album first, and well, it's ok. To me, Turn On The Bright Lights really just sounds boring, but there are some good songs on the album, like Untitled, which to me is a pretty great song. However, the rest of the album just sounds like it's going to put me to sleep, and I just want to turn it off and listen to something else the first time I did listen to it(by the way, this review is basically my thoughts of the album after I've listened to it from the front to the back once, which is probably how most of my reviews are going to be). However, I really do like the bass lines in this album, they remind me of Flea's kind of style for some reason. The guitar lines however just make me want to turn the album off and just go to sleep, and one of my biggest complaints about this album is that, I don't know why, maybe it's just me, but I can just barely hear the vocals in these songs. Maybe it's what they were going for, but to me, it's just stupid sounding when I can barely hear the vocals. In short, in terms of the music quality of TOTBL, it's mid goodish at best, and just bad at the worst.

Now we're gonna talk about the words I can barely hear. So after I listened to this album, I decided to go search up the lyrics to see if they were any good and they're actually pretty good sometimes. But other times, they just don't make fucking sense. For example, take this line from the song PDA on the album, and tell me it makes perfect sense.

Sleep tight, grim rite, we have two hundred couches where you can...
Sleep tight, grim rite, we have two hundred couches where you can...
Sleep tight, grim rite, we have two hundred couches where you can
Sleep tonight, sleep tonight, sleep tonight, sleep tonight

You can't? My point exactly, how we are we supposed to know what two hundred couches mean or symbolize? I get that there's some people out there who  might have listened to this album and understood perfectly what it means, but I am definitely not one of those people. I really want to know what two hundred couches mean, cause it really does seem like a very deep and interesting lyric, but there isn't any other clues in the song's lyrics that let me know what this set of lyrics means, and believe me, I have actually looked at this song's lyrics, I just don't get it, but than again, maybe it's just me, if you get it, good for you, but I simply just don't. However, like I've said before, there are some pretty good lyrics in this album, for example, take a look at this lyric from the third track on the album, NYC.

I had seven faces, thought I knew which one to wear, but I'm sick of spending these lonely nights, training myself not to care

 See, this is a pretty good lyric, it's obvious, it actually sounds good on the album since you can hear the lyrics on this song, and it's very poetic. You can see that he's spending nights all alone and feeling depressed, and that the seven faces represent the main seven emotions(at least, I think that's what it means). Which goes to show that you can be poetic and straightforward at the same time, and even though you may not get what the seven faces mean, the later lyrics express that he's obviously depressed, I mean, you don't just spend nights alone and not caring when you're happy. So there are some pretty good lyrics on the album, but there are some pretty bad ones too.

Lastly we get to how well the album sounds as a whole. Surprisingly, despite the boring ok music, and the sometimes bad lyrics, it still fits really well together as a whole album. It's not one of those albums where the songs are all completely different and have nothing in common with each other, and sound completely off next to one another, but all the music and lyrics fit really well each other and the songs resonate with one another, which is definitely something I can give this album credit for, unlike some other albums that I might review. So now, we go to my final verdict.

So each category on the album gets the album a respective number of points, with a maximum number for each category and added together to make a total score(if this doesn't make sense right now, it might when I give an example). So musically the album gets a 2/4, I get that I pretty much ranted on how boring the album was for me despite maybe one or two good songs, but to me, the album isn't absolutely terrible musically, so I decided to be fair and give it a 2/4. Lyrically, this gets a 2/3, although there are some very good lyrics on this album, there are still the very odd and nonsensical lyrics that the everyman just might not get. Lastly, in terms of how well it functions as a whole, we got a 3/3. The songs and lyrics and everything on this album sound like they were made to be together and wouldn't function as well with out it, which quite simply, definitely gets this album a perfect 3 on that category. In total, that means this album gets a 7/10, which to me, just means good, better then mediocre, but definitely not great. If you can look past the complaints that I have with this album, go give it a listen, you might be able to like it better then I did, until then, I'll see you whenever I do my next review, seeya.