Album of the day (#827): Turn On The Bright Lights

[albummaster]

Today's album of the day

Turn On The Bright Lights by Interpol (View album | Buy this album)

Year: 2002.
Overall rank: 93.
Average rating: 82/100 (from 379 votes).

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Tracks:
1. Untitled
2. Obstacle 1
3. NYC
4. PDA
5. Say Hello To The Angels
6. Hands Away
7. Obstacle 2
8. Stella Was A Diver And She Was Always Down
9. Roland
10. The New
11. Leif Erikson

About album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety.

[Applerill]

Crappy Joy Division cover band.

[Guest]

[Silver]

[Puncture Repair]

Terribly good, but terribly overrated.

Untitled is probably my favourite song.

[OFarrio]

I had listened to this album a couple of times and it just never seemed like anything special. Then a few months later I gave it one more go and I loved it immediately. Weird how things work like that sometimes.

[pearljammer13]

I've listened a couple times, but I just don't like it for whatever reason. I tried.

[Cymro2011]

Nothing new or interesting.

[cartoken]

Brilliant album and the UNTITLED song is breathtaking !

[purple]

I never get why people constantly bounce this album off of Joy Division. These people have succumbed to a kind of modern dadrocker argument in which good influential bands are better than good influenced bands because the good influential bands did it first; the only difference here is that this influential band was active a decade later than the golden age of dadrock. If you think of music in this way, then you'll never grow because you've got a bias towards decades of music. You're not even giving the music a chance, and you're viewing music as a history rather than an artform. I can understand saying this album sounds like Joy Division, and was influenced by Joy Division, because it does and is. However, the moment you make what should be a purely aesthetic critique of the album with the qualifier "not as good as/better than Joy Division," then I think you've really shorthanded yourself in the way you view music. And of course, this album will be better than or worse than Joy Division to you, but statements like this are often not purely aesthetic evaluations of the individual albums and subsequent comparisons, but comparisons for the sake of some influence. /rant

Anyways, I truly enjoy this album. The drumming is mixed fantastically; it's thunderous sometimes. The spindly guitar on Untitled, the shoewavey guitar on NYC, the metal-on-metal guitar at the beginning of The New... there's a lot of great guitar sounds throughout. The bassist knows how to fuckin groove. And then we've got this singer that transitions from a high monotone autistic scream to highly inflected whispers, and that delivers some great lyrics, e.g.


"I'm gonna pull you in close
I'm gonna wrap you up tight
I'm gonna play with the braids that you came here with tonight
I'm gonna hold your face, and toast the snow that fell
Because friends don't waste wine when there's words to sell

I feel like love is in the kitchen with a culinary eye
I think he's making something special
And I'm smart enough to try
If you don't trust yourself for at least one minute each day,
Well you should trust in this, girl, cause loving is coming our way."

I don't think it's on my current chart, but it could easily be on there.