To: Indie-leaning reviewers
From: Last Plane to Jakarta
Re: Interpol
Hi everybody. As you all know, the new Interpol album comes out next week; the promos went out early and the tracks leaked to the internet almost immediately, so you've all probably been waiting to have your say for some time. Soon, quite soon, you'll go public with your impressions of Interpol's second effort. We hope that all of you are old enough to know that use of the phrase "sophomore jinx" will make you look like morons, but then we are known for holding out hope even after seasoned gamblers have declined to take the odds.
We also worry that you're going to pull out the lame Joy Division comparisons again. It was so boring last time, you guys. It was boring because it looked like you'd all been cribbing from one another's reviews, for one thing, but it was also boring because it wasn't really true. Sure: it wasn't a completely specious comparison, and once you started looking for it, it seemed to be everywhere. But it outlived its usefulness in a big hurry, and in no time at all you could have constructed a write-your-own-Interpol-review engine using a PERL manual and a couple of references to Unknown Pleasures. It got to be the music-review equivalent of a police bulletin's "average height and build": useless, a waste of words, of no critical value.
While cleaning the kitchen yesterday morning, we listened to our advance copy of that new Interpol record and we took notes. Some of these may seem frivolous, but all of them are meant earnestly and have been tested for relevance; every one of them, with just a little elbow grease on your part, is guaranteed to increase the yield of crisp prose and insightful observation in your reviews. Hey, you're welcome!
John Cale
Warren Zevon
Pink Floyd's Animals
your favorite animals
The Animals
The Anti-Nowhere League
Robert Fripp's League of Gentlemen
Marilyn Monroe
Saccharine Trust with a different singer
a very depressed Dire Straits
Nico's The Marble Index
Nico in general
the first Cure album
the second Cure album
early Bauhaus
late Bauhaus
Peter Murphy's "Cuts You Up" screwed & chopped
Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters
the Strokes
"Rainy Days and Sundays"
the Sundays
"If I Was a Carpenter"
Graham Greene
a goth Aztec Camera
the Steve Miller Band
Sebadoh
the Wedding Present
weddings in general
Generalissimo Francisco Franco
the Lemon Pipers
a really obscure two-piece from southern California who nobody remembers called Supercollider, who were really good and screened old NASA footage while they played, and I really wanted to see them a bunch of times but I actually only saw them that one time and it was really great
the Beatles
Beat Happening
What's Happening!!!
the remake of the What's Happening!!! remake that'll hit screens circa 2135 and will only be seen by androids
Christian Death's Catastrophe Ballet
the Virgin Prunes
a really mellow Sex Gang Children
the cover of an album I have by a band called We Are Childhood Equals
Rothko if he'd lived to see fluoxetine
Jackson Pollock if he'd never been born
water
air
a late-morning alone in an old-growth forest
S.E. Hinton novels
the Andrea True Connection
the feeling you get from guys who are into conspiracy theory & pyrmaids & shit like that
the suspicion you have that some of these guys could have been you if you'd made just one wrong mental turn at just the wrong moment
"Suspicious Minds"
framed photographs of Elvis
framed photographs of Elvis in a dentist's office
framed photographs of Elvis in a dentist's office on a distant planet
Edward Elgar
Sonic Youth minus the noise fixation
an imaginary band named "Youth Sonique"
old-time hockey
breakfast in Paris
the sun setting after the monsoon rains
the Manic Street Preachers
Nirvana
the credits to a French movie playing in a theater in S.E. Portland on a rainy day
Sarah Records
Blanco y Negro
David Bowie's early singles on Pye
"Downtown"
Susan Amway-era Magnetic Fields
lack of water
lack of air
fluorescent light
a balcony in Adelaide, Sunday, August17th, 2003, 7:00 a.m.
the modern sense of duty
the postmodern suspicion of same
the truth not lying somewhere in between, contrary to what you might expect, but squarely in one of the two camps
Lee Hazlewood's Cowboy in Sweden
Roxy Music with an attitude problem
the Microphones
an old PSA for dental hygiene where the voiceover, a child, introduces the spot by saying "Happy Tooth discovers the real toothache!"
Radiohead
Criswell
the Stranglers
attempting to quit drinking without any help from anybody
shut up, fuck you, I can do it myself
thanks
Strawberry Switchblade's "Since Yesterday"
Tanita Tikaram's band's secret practice tapes
bedrooms whose walls are covered in band fliers
a mountain of skulls in the jungle
Suede
Pulp
Spandau Ballet
This Kind of Punishment
Mighty Joe Young
the C.B. craze-related TV show Movin' On, but not B.J. and the Bear
Sinead O'Conner if things had worked out differently
the band that Sinead's third son will start in 2024
the year 2024 itself, faintly visible there on the horizon
the horizon itself
our own mysterious attraction toward horizons in general
mysterious attractions in general
And there you have it! No points for referencing this list with a smarmy "comparing the new Interpol to these things only makes it look worse" or any phoned-in nonsense like that. Away, then: to the teletype!
