Venue: Katedrala / Kino Šiška / Ljubljana
Concert date: 02.02.2013
Attendance: 300
Ticket price: 18 EUR presale, (students/seniors/pensioners) 14.40 EUR, 22 EUR on the day of the show
It’s raining in Ljubljana. Snowstorms in the surrounding area. Quakes and shake-ups all over Slovenia. Seems like the perfect day for Mr. Banks’s music, the perfect day for a live score to his grayness. Could we have picked a more fitting day? At first listen / glance, hardly, but once we get a bit better acquainted with the music Banks makes (both solo and with Interpol), we hear and see that he has a great sense of irony and humor, black and obscene though it may be. Often when we catch the name Paul Banks in the (music) press, we hear Ian Curtis echoing back, along with everything that always comes in the package with him: depression. But Banks has insisted countless times that he’s far from a cold, gloomy, dour guy, that he has no suicidal tendencies… Maybe a melancholic, maybe even depressed at moments, but who isn’t these days? If anything: a rainbow of grayness, rather than the grayness of a rainbow. A depressing weather forecast is far from the only precondition for a successful gig, but still, human association does its thing here. Depression and American grayness after September 11 are the markers that have always accompanied his rich musical output. They’re the markers that made him musically, established him and put him in a certain (important) corner of music history.
But the story goes on, keeps rolling, and in time this view will change too. The distinction between his solo work and his work in Interpol matters here. In the mother band he’s not the songwriter, just the lyricist. Most of the instrumental material was written by guitarist Daniel Kessler and (former) bassist Carlos Dengler, so the soundscape is above all a reflection of their outlooks on life, their feelings, influences and leanings. Banks’s solo material is sonically much more varied, with plenty of flirting with hip hop (which he loves so much he puts out special hip hop compilations) and with electronic production methods (sampling, a DIY philosophy, one-man band…), but melody and a guitar orientation still remain key (every song is built around some guitar motif). This is distinctly auteur music, hard to pin down as a “revival” of one specific genre (like Interpol with their post-punk period) or as following various current trends. The core of Banks’s solo path is above all a dialogue with himself. Music lets him gaze most honestly inward, lets him open up his deepest personal wounds and questions: facing his own self, facing aging (a look back), facing love troubles, facing the other, facing the world… A liberating, therapeutic confession. That’s also why it’s clear he doesn’t play Interpol songs on tour. The whole story is simply set too intimately for him to include songs in the repertoire that are part of a compromise, part of a wider whole. On his debut Julian Plenti is…Skyscraper Banks still (partly) hid behind a mask, behind a teenage alter ego called Julian Plenti, but this time he opened up and stepped forward under his own name, with no go-betweens, facades or masks (the album Banks). The result is clear: a sparkling and honest album that offers quite a bit of top-notch music.
Paul Banks has already played Ljubljana once with Interpol, at Križanke in August 2011. This time the crew picked a venue better suited to the season: Kino Šiška. An hour before Banks hit the stage, a relatively young and above all unknown band from the Zasavje region called Icarus down introduced themselves to the crowd (which was already sizable). They replaced Arhibald Arhibaldovich as the opener; those were originally announced but later canceled their slot because of a lineup change. Icarus Down formed back in 2004 but have stayed fairly unknown to the wider music community to this day. They cultivate a genre-diverse musical expression, leaning mostly on the legacy of alternative and indie rock. Their sound varies from clean to dirty and distorted, with plenty of mixing of analog and digital elements, and what particularly stands out are the dalliances with ambient soundscapes and the creation of atmospheric music. The band left a pretty good impression overall and, despite a “demo” performance, won over most of the crowd. What especially stuck in my memory were the singer’s voice, which (at moments) recalls the vocals of Brian Molko (Placebo), and the guitarist, who clearly went to the guitar school of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood judging by how he plays. The only problem I noticed relates to that very diversity of expression. There’s always a chance that, precisely because of mixing a huge number of the most varied musical components, a band never develops its own style. You get what’s called a scattering of musical expression, which within a performance shows up as ragged, odd swings in energy. For now Icarus down are still on the safe side of experimenting with their own expression, but I fear that if they don’t take a step forward in the future, it’ll become their “modus operandi”. They’ll end up as just one more band with the telling subtitle “searching”, “in the making”… Which would be a real shame, because the band carries enormous potential. You can catch them next this very Thursday at Orto bar, where they’ll play as part of the second Slovenski teden glasbe (and compete for a slot at one of the big summer festivals near us: Exit, Sziget, Terraneo, Vienna Waves, Taksirat, SpringFestival).
A little after ten, Paul Banks finally walked on stage with three members of his backing crew. I’ve now seen Banks three times in the last three years (besides the Ljubljana Interpol show, I also caught the one in Vienna in October 2010), and he’s always been impeccably dressed and in good shape. Even as a solo act he looks box-fresh, his trademarks still being an Armani suit and a neat “Bundesliga” haircut. Compared to the Interpol shows, he was far more presentable and confident this time, and he turned the intimacy of the latest album into a masterful stage language. Banks doesn’t clown around on stage, the performance flows smoothly, everything is where it should be, his gestures are calm, and his dialogue with the crowd is sparse. Does that all sound too uniform, too static, too “Finnish”, too unemotional? Maybe, until you hear his voice. That vocal alone is a “Gesamkunstwerk”, a complete work of art. It holds everything other performers express through facial expressions, stage presence, light shows, performance and acting. His powerful baritone reveals every emotion, opens the door to Banks’s musical universe and dreams, so we don’t even think about all the usual stagecraft. It should also be added that alongside the vocal, a flawless sonic foundation ran through the whole set, making Banks’s compositions even more compact, more distinct and more homogeneous. The foundation itself is written with mathematical precision and works like a successful chemical formula: everything’s in its place, nothing too much, nothing too little. So it was a real pleasure to listen to the instrumental dynamics and dialogues that Banks and the rest of the crew traded throughout the set (even though it wasn’t a jam).
They played eighteen songs (nine from each album), two of them in the encore. The opener “Unwind” took us back to the teenage years of Banks’s songwriting and could easily be subtitled “a song about a love that stayed and a relationship that’s no more”. Banks played it for the first time on this tour, and it’s a perfect opening number, firmly weaving together pompous brass patterns and melancholic keyboards. A teenager’s idea of love turns into a complex emotion over the years, and that’s what “I’ll Sue You”, played fourth, is about. It’s certainly one of the best songs Banks has ever written. It’s marked by a strong sense of building tension, just like the sixth in line, the minor-key “Arise, Awake”. Wedged between them was the big hit from the first album, the life-lesson-like “Only If You Run”. It doesn’t just confront you with the fact that you alone are responsible for your own life, it also sketches out the basic guidelines for how to tackle it. After each of those songs, Banks also introduced one member of the backing band.
Tenth up was “Young Again”, which marked the first peak of the night. Banks and company pulled off a really powerful, intense and emotionally charged rendition of a song that presents childhood memories as an oasis and a source of joy ahead of what comes later in life. It was followed by the infectious, one-of-a-kind and instrumental “Lisbon”, which brought a bit of classic Interpol-sound melodrama and Mediterranean sweetness to the hall. “Over My Shoulder” then set up a great ground for the end of the regular set. The trip-hoppy, military “The Base” doesn’t just open your eyes (to life), it also opened the last closed valves for enjoyment and letting loose. “Paid For That” continued and gradually deepened the listening release, even though it actually deals with the pretty serious theme of introspection in the process of aging. The main finale before the short break came with “Summertime Is Coming”. Of all Banks’s songs, it’s the one that most resembles some of Interpol’s work. A theatrical live staging that gives you goosebumps. And when the drummer stood up too, I knew we’d reached the peak of the night. In the encore Banks first calmed us down with “On The Esplanade”, then delivered a properly explosive finish with his biggest solo hit, “Games For Days”.
The gig was over. It flew by, despite eighteen songs played. The tempo was high, the crowd reserved at first, but by the end (at least up front) pretty rowdy. And at a show by the “cold” Paul Banks, no less. No two ways about it, the gig was a success, and even if Interpol were to (hypothetically) split up, Banks has a very bright continuation of his musical career ahead of him.
Setlist
PAUL BANKS:
1.) Unwind
2.) Skyscraper
3.) Fun That We Have
4.) I’ll Sue You
5.) Only If You Run
6.) Arise, Awake
7.) Goodbye Toronto
8.) Fly As You Might
9.) No Chance Survival
10.) Young Again
11.) Lisbon
12.) Over My Shoulder
13.) No Mistakes
14.) The Base
15.) Paid For That
16.) Summertime Is Coming
encore:
17.) On The Esplanade
18.) Games For Days
Photo gallery
