Daniel Kessler has been listening to John Coltrane recently. Not because he is “jazz crazy,” as he puts it, or because he wants to channel Coltrane’s sax techniques and impulses through the lead guitar Kessler plays for the band Interpol.
It’s because he likes the mood Coltrane puts him in.
Kessler brings up the jazz legend in response to a question: What guitar players have influenced him? Like some rock musicians, Kessler (a) doesn’t mind letting people know that he listens to something more sophisticated than rock music and (b) doesn’t really want to be compared to other rock guitarists.
“The process of writing songs is very separate from the experience of listening to music,” he says during a recent phone interview. “So guitar players don’t influence me per se. Songs influence me.
“I’m listening to `Ole’ by John Coltrane. It’s not like Coltrane’s going to influence my songwriting or guitar playing. But I like to connect with the mood of a song, and I really appreciate its mood, its chord changes and, I don’t know, its emotional level.
“If I were a learned musician, I might appreciate things like, `Oh, that’s in D minor.’ But I’m a bastard guitar player; I write by feel only.”
So Kessler doesn’t think his appealing guitar work on “Antics,” the latest Interpol album, sounds overtly like the work of any other guitar players. And maybe it doesn’t.
But he also doesn’t think Interpol sounds much like any other band. That’s contrary to what a lot of people have thought since Interpol’s first album, “Turn on the Bright Lights,” was released in 2003. That record prompted lots of acclaim-with-a-hitch when it was released, as in: “Good stuff, but they sound a lot like …”
Even in the town that bred and cultivated them, New York, a writer at The Village Voice wrote of “Lights”: “If they remind people of a band like Joy Division, a group that combined the spirit and energy of U.K. punk with the art-rock futurism of Bowie/Eno/Stooges, well, there’s a reason for that. They’re trying to.”
Not so, says the guy who builds and designs most of the band’s songs.
“I don’t identify with those terms,” Kessler said. “I’ve never thought much about what or who we sound like. If you said we sounded like a jazz-pop band, I might be like, `Whatever,’ too.
“We don’t try to sound like anyone. We don’t want to be labeled. What’s important to us is that we really believe in what we’re doing.”
There are some distinctions between Interpol and all the bands it gets compared to, especially the late/great Joy Division.
For starters, none of the music on “Lights” or “Antics” suggests that the lead singer is one grand mal seizure or an ex-girlfriend away from hanging himself.
As maddening as it is to bands and songwriters, such comparisons have become sport among fans and critics. Several magazines use comparative techniques to give readers an immediate idea of what a band or album sounds like. Alternative Press magazine runs a “rocks like” list with its CD reviews, including: Mates of State’s “All Day” EP rocks like the Postal Service’s “Give Up.”
Kessler, though, wants no part of that game: “That’s for fans and critics to say, `They’re not like that; they’re like this.’ And it’s not for me to say, `No, we sound like this.”‘
