Muzz Retreats Into the Fog
It seems like Paul Banks has never met a side project that he didn't want to pursue. Over the past two decades as the frontman of Interpol he has dabbled in some eclectic projects, some only tangentially related to the driving and gloomy post-punk that his main gig became famous for during the NYC boom of the early aughts. He has released original music under his own name and as the mid-fi balladeer "Julian Plenti"; these two identities overlap heavily, almost to where the distinction becomes moot. He has even produced mixtapes of hip-hop-adjacent fare and released an album with RZA under the Banks and Steelz moniker.
Now in 2020, less than two years after Interpol released one of their spottier post-Carlos D efforts in The Marauder, comes Banks' newest side project, Muzz. Muzz has released a string of singles in the lead up to an LP dropping in June, and if it is a mood you're after, look no further.
Muzz feels like something meaty when compared to something like Julian Plenti Is…Skyscraper, which was a well-meaning but largely middling effort that occasionally felt like little more than a vision board for outtakes that Interpol couldn't bring to fruition in the studio. Skyscraper had some jams, though: "Only If You Run" could be a breezy summer soundtrack, "On The Esplanade" is all Spanish guitar and tinny string arrangement. There was a lot to like on what is arguably his most realized non-Interpol artistic statement.
But Muzz is something different. It is dark rooms and smokily whispered goodbyes. It is the sound of an aging playboy making his own drinks after having given the help a night off. There is a crunchiness to the reverb that brings gravity to the proceedings, even as it seems there may be no connection to the ground whatsoever (see: the velveteen piano intro of "Broken Tambourine").
“Bad Feeling” rolls in on a gentle wave with a narrator reading tea leaves about “moon[s] be[ing] chosen” and “what all the silence means.” Eventually, the titular feelings are sent off into the void with a mild “so long.” But "Red Western Sky" is perhaps the song that feels like the most tangible production of the lot, conjuring an image of a cursed journey through an arid, high desert world. The snares propel, their momentum carrying the melody on its galloping hooves for the majority of the song's three-plus minutes; a church organ melds with Spaghetti-western horns to weave the sort of fortitude that one imagines can only be the product of a specific desperation.
These songs are atmospheric in the way we used to talk about before "atmospheric" became a buzzword deployed on every neoclassical and post-rock album that knew how to utilize the space between notes. The atmosphere is a character on each of these tracks, but not one that is calling the listener to any specific feeling or action. Rather it is a character that has changed the people in the songs, leaving them by turns wistful, wise, dreary, scared - the listener lives the songs through these in-world avatars whose environments have metastasized in them, and the empathetic mode is a welcome change from Banks' typical brand of detachment.
Your mileage may vary, of course. Listeners who wrote Banks off after one too many silly lyrical turns may not find anything here that convinces them of anything different. Those who find him high-handed and artistically aloof will likely not be swayed by this new music, even though its musical nature is quantifiably richer and warmer than much of what has come before it in the PB catalog.
All that said, this project is worth a listen for those of us who enjoy late-career comebacks. Paul Banks proves here that there are some cracking ideas still left in his vault, and he executes them with a cohesion of purpose that feels surprisingly new, or at the very least rediscovered.
