I began to like New York, the racr, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Aenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or dsapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
Made me think of this. Interpol was big my senior year, and so, for reasons I believe I learned from T.S. Eliot (like nothing when it's new--wait until enough time has passed that you can judge it with perspective), I never bothered with them until this year. There's a great quality to their first album--it's all atmospherics, made out of pieces that build slowly but retain their balance (unlike, say, the Arcade Fire, who build slowly to bombast, every single time). The lyrics are mostly forgettable--or at least I try to forget them--but the meter of each line is notable: where most bands keep the lyric length tied to the musical phrase, Interpol occasionally stretch out out their phrases.
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