Firstly, an errant thought on none other than eyelashes guy: I just watched him commentate on CNN a little bit and had the realization that he seems to be rather reasonable when he commentates and he doesn't yell and shout at/over the other commentators like some do. So I guess that's a nice thing that I hadn't explicitly thought of in the past.
I know technically you're supposed to do reviews of things (movies, music, tv, etc) that have recently been released but I just do them based on what's new and/or interesting to me in terms of things that I've watched/read/listened to regardless of if I'm 15 years late such as for this review of an album released in 2002 when I was only a small child.
Now, onto the main topic here. In the sort of recent past, the Killers covered a song called Obstacle 1 by the band Interpol. I listened to this cover and thought Flowers did a good job of it and that the song was interesting. So I ended up listening to the original version of the song which Flowers did quite a good job of mirroring. Generally, covers shouldn't stray too far from the original song. Usually I find myself more amicable towards covers of other songs by bands that I already like rather than covers by other people of songs by bands that I like. Hence, I enjoy the Killers covering Obstacle 1 and Muse covering Please Please Please (which is far superior to the original version in my opinion), but I can't be certain that I'd enjoy, say, some other band/singer covering Mr. Brightside or something. Hopefully you get the idea. In any case, in addition to listening to Interpol's Obstacle 1, I branched out a little bit into another song from the same album (Turn on the Bright Lights - 2002) called NYC. It's an interesting song to say the least. Rather mellow and morose at the same time. Obstacle 1 is a bit more upbeat but at the same time it is also morose. Eventually I listened to the album in its entirety - 11 songs. Overall, it's a morose album. I consider it morose as opposed to melancholy which is a word I use to describe All the Stars and Boulevards by Augustana (plus some of their other songs could be described as such) along with thoughtful which describes all of their songs. Having looked up the definitions of morose and melancholy, the latter means something along the lines of a thoughtful sadness which I think makes pretty good sense to describe All the Stars and Boulevards. Morose means gloomy which is a fair enough description of Turn on the Bright Lights. (huh, both of those album titles are sort of long and wordy)
Overall, the lyrics of the songs on Turn on the Bright Lights range from slightly weird to very weird. Which in some cases works/isn't a particular detriment to the songs but in other cases I don't think it really helps. I think perhaps the lyrics are just a little too weird for me to enjoy the album in full although I do like a few of the songs off of it. Perhaps it's like the people who like Mr. Brightside and Somebody Told Me and All These Things That I've Done off of the Killers' album Hot Fuss but don't particularly care for the rest of the album for whatever reason.
So, in conclusion, I'm not completely sold on this album and it didn't jump out at me like "wow, what a great album!!" although again there are a few songs off of it that I like. It's possible that (this is a sentence that would require the subjunctive in Spanish, by the way) this album might grow on me if I listened to it more, but I'm not sure if I particularly want to listen to it in full again. I suppose I like this band ever so slightly more than the Strokes, who I tried to get into but just couldn't find any songs of theirs that I particularly liked even after going through like the first 5 that popped up in search results so which I assume are the most popular. I would've thought that I would have found at least one song in that selection that I at least sort of liked but alas, I didn't. However, Instant Crush (which isn't really a Strokes song though) is a good song. I guess I like (?!?!) the Smashing Pumpkins ever so slightly more than the Strokes because there are about 5 songs of theirs that I know, and I don't know any Strokes songs. Even though I don't particularly like the Smashing Pumpkins, I know a few of their songs and occasionally for reasons unknown (see what I did there?) feel compelled to listen to them - these songs comprising of 1979, Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Disarm, and Today. Perhaps I could throw Ava Adore on this list as well. But that's it. And I don't even like those songs, I just occasionally for some reason feel compelled to listen to them. A trivia is that the intro to the Smashing Pumpkins' song Today is rather similar to My Chemical Romance's song I Don't Love You. I think MCR was somewhat influenced by the Smashing Pumpkins. However, Gerard seems like a nice person but Billy Corgan just doesn't and I think this is part of why I don't like the Smashing Pumpkins. By this point this post has gotten rather off track from the main subject of Interpol to then the Strokes to then the Smashing Pumpkins with an allusion to the Killers thrown in and then to MCR. So this here will be the end of this long winded post.
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