Banks

Three years after making a solo album as Julian Plenti, Paul Banks put his own name on the second one, and on its title. Julian Plenti Is… Skyscraper (2009) used the name he had played under at NYU, before Interpol. His bandmates chose to use their real names, he told Spin, so he kept the alias for his own songs, and once the early ones were out he let it go. “I didn’t want the burden of shtick for these songs,” he said in Matador’s notes. Banks came out on Matador on October 22, 2012: ten songs, just under 40 minutes, co-produced with Peter Katis, who had produced and mixed Interpol’s debut, Turn On the Bright Lights.

In Interpol, Banks starts from Daniel Kessler’s chord progressions. Here he wrote alone, much of it on the road after the band’s last album, and demoed everything himself, “right down to the hi-hats and strings”, before going near a studio. Katis recorded and mixed it at Tarquin Studios, his home studio in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with extra vocals cut at Electric Lady in New York. The sleeve credits Banks with all the music except drums on three songs, by Charles Burst and Sebastian Thomson, Rob Moose’s violin and viola, Yoed Nir’s cello and some extra instruments from Katis. Banks was listening to a lot of Drake by then, and he played hip-hop records to Katis, who, by Banks’s account, is not into hip-hop.

“The Base”, the opener and first single, given away as a download in August, grew out of its opening guitar riff. Banks wanted the vocal “saturated in reverb”, like a prison warden of the future making an announcement in the middle of the night. Its refrain about seeing “the truth above the lies” was read by Drowned in Sound and the BBC as a nod to the name change. Halfway through “Arise, Awake” there is a voice that Banks says belongs to a cab driver he recorded on his iPhone on his way home. “Young Again” began as an instrumental in 2006. The lyric, he says, replays a teenager’s “crazy absolutes”, “jobs are disgraceful” among them, and Sophia Peer’s video sends him back to school.

Matador’s notes count two instrumentals. “Lisbon” has no vocal at all, and Banks told the Mancunion he has always thought of himself as “a musician first and a singer second”. “Another Chance” sets a monologue from Black Out, a film by his friend Sebastian Ischer, in which a man says there is something wrong with his brain. Elsewhere Banks talks about lyrics that are more direct than before, “some purging and venting”. “Paid for That”, which he calls his rage song, name-checks Folk Implosion, the band that changed him at 17. The closer, “Summertime Is Coming”, is the one song left over from the Julian Plenti years, and it had already appeared on the Julian Plenti Lives… EP in June.

Critics leaned positive without agreeing on why. NME gave it 8 out of 10 and said he sounded revitalised; DIY gave it 4 out of 5; Drowned in Sound gave it 7 and called it good but short on cohesion. Consequence picked “Lisbon” as the standout. Pitchfork, at 5.8, found it sluggish, thought a couple of songs needed a real band behind them, and named “Summertime Is Coming”, which people had already heard, as the best thing on it. The BBC called it “a curate’s egg of an album”. Both the BBC and Drowned in Sound were puzzled by the chorus of “I’ll Sue You”, which runs “I’ll sue you, I’ll sue you, I’m suing you”. Metacritic’s average was 65.

The split points to where the record works. The songs closest to Interpol are the ones reviewers kept measuring against the band, and by most accounts they read as Interpol without Interpol. The parts only Banks could have made, the demo-first arrangements with strings, the cab driver, the film monologue, the instrumentals, are what justify dropping the alias. It is uneven, and it is plainly one person’s record, which is what he said he wanted. His next release, early in 2013, was a hip-hop mixtape with El-P and Talib Kweli on it.