Surreal sandwich: JASON MRAZ AND INTERPOL

Jason Mraz is an American singer-songwriter who plays a mean acoustic guitar and wears a fisherman’s hat (which was made hip by the New Radicals’ Gregg Alexander). He is a hit with teenyboppers. Interpol is an American band that purveys gloomy, brooding music (which was made hip by gloomy, brooding bands like Joy Division and The Smiths). The group is a hit to those who are on the brink of asphyxiating themselves. These two acts may be a surreal pairing. They are leagues apart. But both of them create music. There is the same A minor or a C# somewhere in their songs. That’s the quirky thing about music: One singer’s use of a chord may accompany a lame line like "There’s nothing I can do/A total eclipse of the heart" (A Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler) and another’s use of the very same chord may go with a groovy line like "I was lying in a burned out basement/With the full moon in my eyes" (Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush).

Music is like a box of freaking chocolates. Here, have a surreal sandwich.

Mraz Appeal

Top two questions in a Jason Mraz press conference held recently at Sidebar Café in Ortigas: 1) "If you were an appetizer, what would you be?" and 2) If you were a coffee flavor, what would you be?

Too bad nobody asked, "If you were a Powerpuff Girl, who would you be?" I just don’t get it. Maybe I missed too many Psych classes or Click episodes, which explains why I can’t see the logical (or teen magazine) connection between identifying oneself with an appetizer (say sisig or garlic mushrooms) and revealing more about oneself in the process. (The sisig person is a schizophrenic pig; the garlic-mushroom person has a head shaped like a toadstool.) What gives? It’s like people around you discussing Charles (and not Marilyn) Manson, and you’re a card-carrying member of the Jesus Miracle Crusade Against Violence.

Hey, if you get a feeling that this article is not at all about Jason Mraz, you’re right and wrong at the same time. Allow me to expound.

Mraz recently played at Dish and the Aliw Theater with Paolo Santos as special guest, a.k.a. "Mr. Acoustic" (why, did he discover the instrument?). The singer-songwriter behind the hits Sleep All Day and The Remedy might have played to an SRO crowd. Well, he probably did. That’s not surprising, considering the following he has in our country (especially teens and exiles from the John Mayer fan club). And one of Mr. Mraz’s stops was Sidebar Café for a chat with the press.

In fairness, Jason gave witty answers to foggy questions. He came across as a musician who is sincerely surprised at his newfound fame. Imagine being an ordinary guy who hails from Mechanicsville, Virginia in one moment, and in the next touring as a pop singer with a string of hits in the US and in a far-flung archipelago (the Philippines) in a far-flung continent (Asia). That’s tough shit to handle for someone so young.

He tells those who want to be successful musicians not to expect greatness and to take a vow of poverty. "Success is just a side effect. It is all about recognizing what you’re passionate about," he says, adding that for him constant touring and traveling are the perks of being a musician. "Music is my own reward. The fact that I travel around the world and made it this far just blows me away."

Jason got into guitar as a kid but found out that he couldn’t play cover songs, so he wrote his own ditties. "I wanted to tell my own stories. I knew it was going to be a long process, but I gave it a shot."

Mraz is an entertaining bloke to listen to. He recounts stories about a doomed and salvaged Valentine date; a Vegas marriage gone awry; the sexual connotations of the title of his debut disc ("Waiting For My Rocket To Come"); his fantasy of making the cover of Rolling Stone; his choice tour mates (Jewel and Dido, because of their lovely sense of storytelling); and about the "garden-gnome-with-a-phallus" incident during a gig on the Liz Phair tour. He also sang his killer karaoke tune: Tom Jones’ It’s Not Unusual to the delight of gals (and even some guys – I heard one dude squeal, believe it or not) from the press.

Yeah, if Jason Mraz were an appetizer he said he’d be an oyster dish because "an oyster makes you wonder if there indeed is a pearl inside." Hey, if Jason Mraz were an appetizer he wouldn’t be able to sing or pick up a goddamn guitar or answer silly questions.

He’d go great with beer, though.

Never The Bright Lights Forever

If Paul Banks and the rest of Interpol were an appetizer, they’d be a plate of peanuts dabbed with sulfur, acid rain and regret. Bring on the cups of hemlock!

There are bandwagons as there are jumpers, and we’ve seen how the success of garage rock revivalists the White Stripes has spawned monstrous imitators. It’s damn hard these days to tell The Hives apart from The Vines – without looking at their music videos, of course. New York City band Interpol draws inspiration not from the hot and festering undergrounds of New York (the breeding ground of the Velvet Underground, The Ramones and The Strokes) or Detroit (the home-court of Iggy and the Stooges), but from the cold and clammy boroughs of Manchester (the turf of all those Madchester bands).

Often, the guys from Interpol sound like Englishmen in New York more than New Yorkers playing gloomy, post-punk Brit rock. They seemingly come from a planet with impossibly gloomy skies, a city where it’s dark, dismal and forever drizzling. Alas its difference from the more celebrated and heavily hyped "it" bands, which for some reason I also like (well, they’re better than the dramatically ridiculous Linkin Bizkit).

Maybe it’s vocalist Paul Banks’ elegiac, morose, clinical, gothy vocals, which recall epileptic Ian Curtis’ suicidal innuendos with Joy Division, the band that convinced Brit journalist Neil Norman he could "spit into the face of God." (Hey, Interpol made me listen and like JD’s Transmission and Warsaw again.) Maybe it’s the swirling, dense guitars washed with delay courtesy of Daniel Kessler, so evocative of Johnny Marr (The Smiths) and Bernard Albrecht/Sumner (Joy Division/New Order). Maybe it’s the oppressively spare bass courtesy of the dapper Carlos D. (source: the low-end work of the one and only Peter Hook of New Order). Maybe it’s those shimmering keyboards or the minimalist drumming. Maybe, it’s those bleak and beautiful stories Interpol weaves:

About an isolated and tragically lonely human being contemplating messy pavements and pornographic subways; a girl who puts weights into little hearts; a butcher who has sixteen knives; a man who can only love subliminally; and people who exist eternally on the outskirts and on the fringes.

Yeah, it might be too late to write about Interpol’s "Turn On The Bright Lights," an album released in August 2002, but as they say, better late than never. (Hey, Teacher Tanya, we had a chance to watch the band in Tokyo last year but ended up rendezvousing with a bus that never waited, shopping for records we didn’t find, and making up for lost time we never had – which, come to think of it, is so very Interpol.)

The first cut is titled, ironically, Untitled. Sinuous, melancholic groove with the repeated line, "Surprise, sometimes, will come around." This cut, more than the rest, evokes the Joy Division comparison. This is one of the best first tracks ever since Radiohead’s Airbag ("OK Computer") or Jane’s Addiction’s Stop ("Ritual De Lo Habitual").

In Obstacle 1, there is the killer line: "It’s different now that I’m poor and aging/And I’ll never see this place again/And you go stabbing yourself in the neck." Images of love, death and faded glories thread this album like strands of a second-hand charity shop suit, the kind that Carlos D. wears.

One of my favorite tracks is NYC, which is an ode to a city that is mysterious, menacing, monstrous, and yet cares at the same time. The song’s persona dreams of redemption: "But I’m sick of spending these lonely nights/Training myself not to care… Got to be some more change in my life"

A caveat: What the hell does "Subway she is a porno/The pavements they are a mess" mean, anyway?

PDA is a more upbeat number. So is Say Hello To The Angels. Well, upbeat in Interpol’s standards. Tempo is relative, anyway: What maybe an ecstatic, optimistic number in Interpol’s discography may come across like a twelve-bar blues if sang by The Vines or, God forbid, Mandy Moore (who has a knack of picking really good songs to clobber, er, cover – case in point is the Waterboys’ The Whole of the Moon).

The song PDA yields another really terrific line, "Sleep tight, grim rite, we have two hundred couches where you can/Sleep tonight…" One needs nothing short of two hundred couches to sleep on after taking huge dosages of depressing Interpol music.

Paranoiac Stella in Stella Was A Driver And She Was Always Down is a "catatonic sex toy, love-joy diver" who moves in mysterious ways, not unlike a protagonist in an absurd Sandman short story (straight from, say, Fables & Reflections). Here, Banks whispers, "There’s something that’s invisible/There’s some things you can’t hide/Try detect you when I’m sleeping/In a wave you say goodbye..."

The final cut titled Leif Erikson brings the whole tragedy to an ambivalent ending. "I’ll bring you when my lifeboat sails through the night," floats these words over chiming keyboards, hinting at stranger, more brooding journeys ahead.

Interpol’s gloomy brand of rock is the only version of desertion that I could ever subscribe to – except probably Joy Division’s.

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One reader said she got the urge to buy Ryan Adams’ "Love is Hell" albums in a record bar in a mall after reading "The Best Singer-Songwriter You’ve Never Heard Of" in YS. Of course, all she saw were Michael Bublé albums – all nine million of them. It’s probably the same case with Interpol or Elbow or Eliot Smith or Polyphonic Spree or early White Stripes CDs – NOT AVAILABLE… NEVER WAS AND NEVER WILL. Sad. Depressing. Please pass the plate of sulfur appetizers.

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For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja@hotmail.com.