I like Friday afternoons, end of the working week and all that. I like them even more when I'm not too busy at work and I get to whack on the head phones for an hour or two before I leave. It gotten to the stage now where I kind of have a Friday afternoon set with lots of upbeat, kick-start the weekend tracks and always in there somewhere I stick on Interpol's debut album 'Turn on the Bright Lights'. To be honest, I generally go straight for track four, 'PDA'.

I first discovered Interpol in Canada during 2002. I remember listening to their eponymous Interpol E.P on some long bus journey to God-knows-where and being completely consumed by it. I was immediately struck by the power and grace of the opening few chords of PDA and then when the outro kicked in and that sweeping guitar riff took over ... if the bus had careered down a ravine at that instant I would have died a deliriously happy man. I must have listened to that track 20 times back-to-back and to this day I have never tired of that song. For me, Interpol are the defining band of this decade, I quote here from Pitchfork Media "Like an antidote to the po-mo dilemma, Interpol convey all the ache of isolation and being driven apart from those you care about in just fifteen minutes, then do themselves one better by suffusing each track with an unmistakable serenity, reckoning with the problem. It's a credit to these unsung talents from the wilderness of New York that they've been able to craft an EP of such power and grace that all I'm left with is the pseudo-intellectual drivel you just waded through".

I won't even attempt 'pseudo-intellectual drivel' but I will say, a better post punk, post modern, post what ever-the-fuck you want band I have yet to hear. Arcade Fire, Bloc Party and all other newcomers have fallen short. I won't bore you with superlatives just advice; if you haven't done so already, go out and buy 'Turn on the Bright Lights' and their second album 'Antics' the next time you walk into a record store.

Published by Padraig.