Paul Blanks-Julian Plenti Lives…
Paul Blanks-Julian Plenti Lives…
Interpol leader Paul Banks’ second Julian Plenti release bears three covers and two originals, and raises the question of where Banks is headed with the project.
There’s always been something that doesn’t quite add up about Interpol leader Paul Banks. His precise self-presentation is hard to reconcile with that stark, ungainly voice. What sort of creature is that supposed to be? The singer’s internally turbulent blankness was the catalytic agent in Interpol’s modern classic, Turn on the Bright Lights, which they started to work on in November 2001. When it came out the following year, its overlays of urban-apocalyptic vision and made a visceral kind of sense: Banks sounding stunned with emotion amid his band’s massive architecture.
Interpol were quickly elected avatars of the post-9/11, Brooklyn-centered post-punk boom, an improbable moment when it seemed like Echo and the Bunnymen were more influential than the Rolling Stones, which was immortalized in a Believer article called “Well-Dressed Men Sing Songs for Oblivion”. But the moment passed, and Interpol ceased to feel inevitable. Though they still technically exist, it’s hard not to think of them in the past tense. Whether Banks’ elusive persona will be interesting to listeners in other contexts is an open question. It wasn’t resolved on his capricious solo debut, Julian Plenti Is… Skyscraper, and it isn’t resolved on Julian Plenti Lives…, a perfectly decent if rather bizarre teaser EP for an impending follow-up. Those ambivalent ellipses are spot-on. We still have no clue what this project is really about or who Julian Plenti is, let alone Paul Banks.
The EP consists of two originals and three covers seemingly plucked at random. Opening instrumental “Perimeter Deactivated” is a driving version of a Harold Faltermeyer theme from the 1987 Schwarzenegger film The Running Man. “Mythsysizer” is a J Dilla cover with concussive guitar chords and swirling pianos. “I’m a Fool to Want You” is a fairly straight Sinatra cover with— why not?— a light trip-hop undercarriage, and comes off about as well as that possibly could. There’s also an original instrumental that sounds like a less-funky Ratatat cribbing riffs from “Float On”. You could be forgiven for wondering what in the hell is going on. Let’s hope that these confusing covers are just filler to round out “Summertime Is Coming”, which would form an intriguing basis for the new Julian Plenti album.