Black cover. Grim title. Not a single new song. What we have on our hands is a perfect posthumous release, with the sole disadvantage that Paul Banks & Co. are still walking this Earth. Owing less to inspiration than to a multi-pronged strategy for breaking the band in every possible market, Interpol's Black EP arrives to European stores and Stateside hard drives today loaded with some dubious booty. I've kept my backlash impulse in check all through the band's ascent, but that urge (to horribly paraphrase) is out of the icebox.
Opening the disc is "Say Hello to the Angels", arguably one of the weakest numbers on the band's 2002 debut, Turn on the Bright Lights; it's the only one that sounds something like The Strokes, and thus makes for the record's most predictable single. Since the version included here is the same one found on the LP, it makes little sense to discuss it in the context of this EP, although I can't help but note that it does feature the all-time widest gamut of Banks's lyrical skills: going from the genuinely great line, "This isn't you yet/ What you thought was such a conquest," to the lazy, automatic scripture, "You're hair is so pretty and red/ Baby, baby you're really the best," is one of the most painful juxtapositions in quality in the band's entire catalog (though "Obstacle 1"'s "Her stories are boring and stuff/ She's always calling my bluff" still marks the nadir).
Next comes the demo version of "NYC" already available on the Yes New York compilation. Lacking the album's caviar-rich production and Greg Calbi's always impeccable mastering, the song loses most of its whooshing sweep; in fact, it begins to sound suspiciously like something by Luna circa Penthouse. One could argue that isn't a problem, since Interpol will in all likelihood tone down their insecure, overeager fashion sense and tidily fall into that chic, detached role at some point, but the rest of the EP is pure ballast.
The remaining four cuts are culled from the band's August 27, 2002 appearance on The Black Sessions, a popular in-studio concert broadcast on France's Inter radio, aired during Bernard Lenoir's C'est Lenoir program. By now a widely available bootleg (with several additional tracks not included on this EP), their Maison de la Radio Black Session evidences a frequent complaint leveled against these Royal Tenenbaum goths: the sound of their songs in a live setting varies little from how they appear on record. To boot, this was clearly not the band's most "on" performance: the Turn on the Bright Lights tracks ("PDA", "Leif Erikson" and "Obstacle 1") are sober and flat, and impossibly, "Specialist"-- an excellent track they've strategically made something of a "rarity"-- sounds even more exhausted than its dub-like indie jangle.
It's difficult to imagine a reason a label would issue this disc, other than to pacify completists, but the rabid fans will no doubt already have the entire Black Session on MP3. You can throw a bone in a variety of ways, but Black chooses the most insulting one, bouncing widely traded material off our begging noses. The best EPs out there feel like genuine spasms of generosity, even if they're overt placeholders while a band cautiously probes new turf or clears house before a big departure; Radiohead's Airbag/How Am I Driving?, the ne plus ultra of the latter, packed seven songs, ten pages of artwork and Noam Chomsky's biggest paycheck.
Whether or not Interpol have had much of hand in the decision-making behind Turn on the Bright Lights' satellite releases, it is having an affect on their image. That their debut album was priced under $8 until it began to take off was a windfall in cool and credibility, but as their singles discography continues to grow and the level of substance decreases, fans might not be remiss in wondering if the band had planned all along to recoup by selling the same album twice.
