While it's a quaint and touristy place rife with the maritime charm unique to coastal New England hamlets, Bridgeport, Connecticut has apast as dark and murky as the brackish tide in its harbors. Spirits of dead seafarers and fallen Continental Army soldiers prowl through the frigid night and the nearby Penfield Lighthouse is supposedly occupied by the ghost of its former keeper. To this day the town is still haunted by memories of the 'phantom stabber' who terrorized the town between 1925 and 1928, brazenly slashing young women to death in broad daylight. (The spots where Lizzie Borden hacked her parents into bite-sized pieces and witches went up in colonial flames, meanwhile, are both within a few hours' driving time in case you're hunting for new and exciting family-fun destinations.) But when Big Apple melody makers Interpol began laying groundwork for their debut full-length, Turn On the Bright Lights (Matador), escaping the flux and smash of the urban jungle was priority number one, hobgoblins or no. So to Bridgeport they went, their sights set on Tarquin Studios and a leisurely, laid-back recording experience.

Or so they thought. The stately Victorian housing Tarquin's "the kind of home that you'll look at it from the outside and go, 'This could be like the beginning of The Shining,'" laughs guitarist Daniel Kessler. For good reason, too: In the 19th century, it was an asylum for emotionally-disturbed youth. Clues to the building's former life lurk around every corner: stairways in places they normally wouldn't be, weird alcoves, odd nooks. But that was of little consequence for frontman Paul Banks, who simply straightened his tie, plugged in his electric Gibson and went to work. ("It was like camp or something: When we couldn't go any further, we just went down one flight and passed out.") Even his walk to a local cemetery with drummer Sam Fogarino was for all intents and purposes a leisurely stroll-- until he leaned in for a closer look at some of the headstones. "There was one that said 'BANKS' and then one that said 'PAUL' -- right alongside each other!"

Even though an experience like that would shake most anyone to the core (or, as the case may be, send them barreling through the doors of half-pint Bedlam and into a straitjacket), the blond, boyish Banks brushed it off as he would a speck of lint from one of his perfectly-creased French cuffs. You read that right -- French cuffs. The well-heeled gentleman is a rare specimen in rock 'n' roll circa 2002, but Interpol take the genre and dress it to the nines, the tens even. To them, the unfashionable male is a social detriment, an agent of urban blight, a pox on all that which is morally-upstanding and right. With geeky emo gear, ghetto-ready J. Lo bootywear and regurgitated glam-rock threads de rigueur these days, popular music is in dire need of the fashion police. Who better than Interpol, who appeared in Gear wearing more than $6000 worth of Dolce & Gabbana, Calvin Klein and Cesare Paciotti designs, to dispense citations? (As bassist and keyboardist Carlos Dengler recently informed the French newspaper Liberation, "When I see a badly-dressed guy, it makes me sick.")

Created in long, often-exhausting sessions that lasted 16 hours or more, Turn On the Bright Lights (which was preceded by a three-song EP in August) is as stylized and polished as its members' appearances. The straightforward, economic cadence of Banks' speech and studied poise translates seamlessly into his singing -- there's no histrionics or unnecessary inflections to be found. That energy's reserved for the guitars he and Kessler use to generate some of the most jaw-dropping riffs you're likely to hear these days (see "Untitled," "Obstacle 2," and "Say Hello to the Angels" for details). While the songs were ripe for the studio, having been played and honed live many times over, they weren't recorded without difficulty. "Vocally, it was a real learning experience," confides Banks. "It's not very comfortable to have to sing with headphones, rocking the pantyhose as the Beastie Boys would say. I've always hated that environment, being all by myself and singing into a microphone. I discovered for the first time that you could use hand-held microphones in the studio -- I'd worked with an engineer once before that was, like, 'NO'! So I did what I could to recreate a more live environment for myself; I was able to move around and shit like that. But that was challenging, to find those comfort levels." While Banks' slyly-suggestive, sardonically-delivered lyrical missives might seem random-- subways likened to skin flicks, catatonic sex toys, the butcher with 16 knives and, most famously, the 200 couches where you can sleep tight -- "there's always a meaning, for me," he insists. "I try and formulate concrete ideas in my own mind; it's certainly not random. You know Andre Breton? I think he's credited with inventing the earliest form of stream-of-consciousness where they'd just write really wacky shit. There's something really great in that, so in that pure sense of stream-of-consciousness it's a good thing. Because I think sometimes it's associated with, like, crap." Speaking of crap: In case you're just tuning in, kiddies, rock is back (even though it never really went away in the first place) and New York's where you'll find it. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Fine, if you're hard of hearing. The Strokes? Poseurs. Andrew W.K.? The poster boy for physician-assisted suicide. Fischerspooner? Not bad for a Kraftwerk cover band. The Moldy Peaches? Don't even go there. Like pinstripes or an expertly-tied Windsor knot, Interpol's music resonates with the timeless appeal that transcends even the most pervasive trends. And with the possible exception of the Mooney Suzuki's recent offerings, Turn On the Bright Lights is quite possibly the only current issuance that'll still be relevant when the vomitrocious Gotham hype flooding the sonic arts ebbs back out to sea where it belongs. For Interpol, who began formulating their smooth sound (and pimpadelic style) years before Julian Casablancas and his bratly ways were a glimmer in anyone's eye, it's all but irrelevant. "We certainly don't think we've benefited from this New York City magnifying glass that's going on right now," Kessler says. "It was very different when we started out and no one really cared about New York. We waited for the right record label, we didn't rush into it, we were very patient in that aspect. It wasn't a catalyst for the band."

A bigger catalyst surfaced when Fogarino settled behind the kit in 2000. "It was a real boost of energy for us," Banks remembers. "Sam is at heart a rock drummer and he had been playing in this low-key jazzy outfit where he was playing brushes and kind of holding back. He got in here and realized he could beat the shit out of the drums again -- there was so much energy in our first rehearsal with him. It's really important to me that a drummer is very good. You can't really say that you're only as good as your drummer, but it fucking helps."

While Interpol's music echos groups like Television, Wire and early Kitchens of Distinction, Banks' voice, evocative of one of rock's most lamented suicides, inevitably directs many comparisons toward Joy Division. "I haven't listened to enough Joy Division, and now I kind of steer away from it just so nothing seeps in through the subconscious," Kessler says, laughing uneasily. "I think our song directions are different than theirs, they were a lot darker than we are. I think there is some Television probably in our music. The fact that people seem to think that we sound like bands from 20 years ago-- it's very cool, and it's definitely very flattering. But I wouldn't say those bands are any more of an influence than bands from a year ago or ten years ago."

"Brevity is a concept that we're sort of exploring a little bit," reveals Banks. "Sam and Carlos are still getting to new places together, and so we want to focus on having a fucking absolutely killer rhythm backbone and exploring the impact that can have. I always had a sense of that being very exciting. I wasn't listening to the same things as Carlos or Dan. I don't play like Dan -- my guitar style is different. I always played acoustic and I didn't even have much of an interest in the electric. Musically, we were coming from very different places, and I didn't really care for some of the stuff that they were into. But what I could never deny is that I just loved what they were writing." "We still have a lot to learn about each other," Kessler acknowledges. "It's been a very interesting experience the whole way through and we're still getting to know each other. We're still figuring out what it is that makes us tick as a band. It's not very clear in a way, but it works."

And darling, it looks faaaaabulous to boot.

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