Interpol are the Benjamin Button of indie rock. In 2002, they burst into the world fully formed: self-serious New York rockers, black-clad potential rivals to The Strokes, and with a debut to prove it. Few bands have the gall to title the first song on their first album “Untitled,” but Interpol got away with their hubris because “Untitled” and the 10 songs that followed it were simply excellent. That debut, Turn on the Bright Lights, is an unquestionable fixture of the indie rock canon—alternately contemplative and frenetic, aware of its influences but not imitative. It is a mature, mysterious, and complex album that no one has replicated since its arrival—not even the band that made it.

The initial data are not promising. El Pintor does not sound like Turn On the Bright Lights, not in the slightest. In fact, of all Interpol’s subsequent albums, this one might sound the least like their debut. It’s all jagged edges and pinched guitar tones and thundering drums; in short, it’s roughly what you’d expect from a bunch of guys who grew up listening to Joy Division and Television, regardless of whether Interpol’s members actually fit that description (I bet they do).

If you come to Thee Oh Sees looking for something fresh and exciting, you will leave disappointed. But there will always be a place in my heart for unabashed, unaffected, hard-partying, rock-and-roll hooliganism, and Thee Oh Sees make a good case for themselves on Drop for why they deserve that spot.

The opening track, “Penetrating Eye,” perfectly sets the expectations for the rest of the album. On it, a keyboard drifts through some ominous arpeggios before a brief squeal of feedback launches the band into the first of many gnarled guitar riffs. The sound is satisfyingly filthy, almost unhealthily so, like an old tennis shoe dragged through a puddle of motor oil and then lit on fire so that it sits smoldering in a back alley until someone drops a garbage bag on it.

If Jack White, an influence or at least a kindred soul, took criticism for trying to pay homage to so many influences that he ended up honoring none of them, The Oh Sees have so efficiently blended so many inspirations here, from Wire and the Velvet Underground to Joy Division and most of all Led Zeppelin, that they just end up sounding like the platonic ideal of a garage rock band.

And that is fine with me. If the Oh Sees can deliver solid rock and roll—and tunes like “Drop” and “Penetrating Eye” prove they can—I see no reason to hold their lack of imagination against them. Indie music has a tendency to fawn over imagination and underrate visceral, inebriated, emotional power, which isn’t necessarily easier to achieve even if it’s thought to be so. But while fawning requires really caring about a band, enjoying Thee Oh Sees demands only a few beers and some loud speakers, and thankfully I have both at my disposal.

In 1894, a riot broke out in New Haven, provoked by rumors that Yale medical students were digging up freshly buried bodies to use as cadavers. Yalies and New Haven residents alike were injured in the melee, and while tension between the groups was nothing new, the intensity of the conflict—and perhaps the nature of the rumors that had fueled it—forced Elm City and university officials alike to come to the table, searching for a way to improve their troubled coexistence.

At the time, city police rarely ventured onto Yale’s grounds, and when they did, they were met with skepticism and even open hostility. But in the wake of the cadaver riot, the university and the NHPD agreed to have two officers live permanently on Yale’s campus. When students warmed to the policemen’s presence, the university hired them to found a new police department, the first university-affiliated force in the country.

So begins the history of the Yale Police Department (YPD). I was at their headquarters last Tuesday night, waiting for the first session of department’s twice-annual Citizen Police Academy to begin. Now in its seventh year, the Academy is a free, six-week course in the operations of a functional police force and of law enforcement in general. Attendees meet officers, study the YPD’s impressive and little-known capabilities, and learn how to avoid exposing themselves to crime—tips that the Academy’s organizers hope they will disperse throughout the Yale community. But beyond that, the Academy seeks to promote a friendlier image of police than one might otherwise imagine.

“They see us as people,” Assistant Chief Mike Patten said of those who complete the course. In the wake of the cadaver riots, it was students who opened their doors to the police; through the Citizen’s academy, the YPD returns the gesture.

 ***

The program’s 20 or so attendees include students, community members, faculty and even Silliman College Dean Hugh Flick. They’re here for reasons both personal and practical: the security directors from the Yale Center for British Art and the Peabody Museum hope to establish a relationship with the police, others are interested in police work as a career, and one woman mentions her affinity for cop shows, which gets a laugh. We all sit at tables around the edges of the YPD’s training room. It’s a large, carpeted space with a lectern, a projector, and walls painted a municipal white. In the middle stand the three officers conducting the program: Patten, Assistant Chief Steven Woznyk, and Lieutenant Von Narcisse, a head taller than his two superiors. Narcisse runs the program, but it’s Patten who takes the floor first, pacing the middle of the room and clicking through slides in a PowerPoint as he explains the program’s intentions and structure. He then moves on to talk about the YPD itself.

“Anything the police department does where you live,” Patten explains, “we do.”

A woman next to me raises her hand. “What about horses? Do you have horses?” she asks in a thick Dutch accent.

Patten laughs and explains that no, the YPD does not have horses, although it does have a Segway. But many in the room register genuine surprise at his first assertion of the YPD’s capabilities. In fact, none of the attendees I spoke to had understood initially that the YPD was a full-fledged police force, with the same legal stature as the NHPD. The YPD derives its legal authority from New Haven’s Board of Police Commissioners, a civilian legal body that also authorizes the NHPD. The two departments even wear the same badge.

Much of the Academy is dedicated to explaining the YPD’s capabilities and responsibilities to those who might otherwise have taken its officers for glorified security guards. The course curriculum covers the department’s patrol procedures, its communication technology, and its interactions with the FBI and the Secret Service. (“We made a lot of money off Tony Blair,” Patten said. “He always comes in at night, so you get overtime.”) The YPD even has its own bomb squad, which stays busy doing sweeps before visits from the aforementioned dignitaries. The star of the show is undeniably the department’s bomb-sniffing dog, Whitney. When Whitney’s handler, officer Charlie Habron, lets her roam the classroom, she licks one attendee’s face in pursuit of some Cheez-It residue. Later, Habron gives us a demonstration of Whitney’s bomb-sniffing prowess, hiding a few shotgun shells under a trashcan in the corner for her to discover. When she sits down next to the trashcan to alert Habron of her find, he rewards her with treats—how else do you expect to train a police dog?

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said Jeremy Goldstein, DC ’14, who took the class in fall of 2013. “I definitely feel a lot safer walking around Yale.” He cites the department’s technology as a reason: “All those blue phones have a 360-degree camera that is constantly recording,” he told me. “They can see anything at any time.”

Goldstein is in SAE, and is part of the fraternity’s new but growing connection to the Academy: during the course, when a few students introduce themselves as members of a fraternity, Assistant Chief Woznyk immediately asks if they are from SAE, which two of them are. After Goldstein took the class, then-SAE president Leander McCormick-Goodhart, BK ’15, took it the following fall with an eye towards improving relations between the YPD and his fraternity.

“When a fraternity has a party, and the police come to break it up, it’s better that they know the people,” Goldstein explained to me. “Having that relationship is very disarming in what can otherwise be a more tense situation.”

Zubin Mittal, TD ’16, one of the SAE brothers that attended Tuesday’s class, said much the same thing. He told me that that Goldstein and McCormick-Goodhart are on a first-name basis with many police officers, and that as a result, interactions with police who show up at SAE’s parties are “friendlier than I expected.”

“Friendlier than I expected” could be a slogan for the course as a whole. Among its core aims, Woznyk said in an email, is to “foster partnerships between the YPD and the Yale and Greater New Haven community.” “Partnership” probably isn’t the first word that springs to mind when one thinks of the police, and the Academy’s organizers know this. “But who is the only person in the world who can take someone’s life legally, without anyone else reviewing it?” Patten asked. “A police officer, right?” Given this, Patten went on to stress the importance of the trust that the police must earn from citizens. “Trust” is one of four words on the YPD’s crest.

The authority police have over others often leads them to be cast in a bad light, Patten acknowledged, and he dwelled for a while on the negative perception often held of officers like himself.  Not that this seems to be an issue among the present crowd, many of whom profess an interest in law enforcement or a fondness for cop shows, and only one of whom admits to ever having a negative experience with a police officer. But there is, as one attendee put it to me later, an inescapable “Oh shit!” reaction to the presence of police in any situation: presiding over pat-downs at a baseball game, weaving through traffic in your rear view mirror. Working past or at least minimizing that reaction is a focus for Woznyk, Narcisse and Patten, as they joke incessantly with the civilians around them.

“I certainly didn’t have a negative perception of police beforehand,” Goldstein said. “But having developed relationships with them, it’s a nice thing. There’s one officer who taught a bunch of the classes, he just got married a couple months ago, I saw him and we spoke about that for a while, he asked me about my thesis.”

The NHPD runs a similar program with similar aims that’s now in its 14th year. As they do in the YPD’s Academy, enrollees get an up-close look at the NHPD’s operations, meeting the bomb dog and the SWAT team. But the realities under which the NHPD operates sets their Citizens’ Academy apart. “Back in the 80s, we had this perception that cops didn’t relate to the public—that we went out and we beat down on people,” said officer Jacqueline Hoyte of the NHPD. “We want to change those negative perceptions.”

Perceptions, Hoyte said, are key to police work, and especially to the up-close-and-personal “community policing” that the department adopted under Chief Dean Esserman. Esserman himself always makes an appearance at the Citizen Academy. It’s all in the name of “partnership,” said Hoyte—the same word I heard from Woznyk. And just as I heard from Patten, Hoyte tells me that Academy attendees often come to a startling realization about police officers: “You’re just regular people!” And that improved relationship with the police often has concrete results; Hoyte tells me of one man who, after finishing the Academy, went on to start a local block watch.

***

Back at the YPD, the session closes with a group photo. Whitney, the bomb-sniffing dog, is of course front and center; we have to snap a few photos before she agrees to look at the camera. The picture finally taken, everyone shakes hands and gets their parking passes validated before scattering to their cars. On the walk back to campus, I can’t help but feel a little bit safer.

It’s a little off-putting to walk into a restaurant and be told that, “tonight’s theme is dumpster diving.” I do try to keep an open mind; I have eaten escargot before (they don’t taste like chicken—they taste like snail). But for me, “dumpster diving” doesn’t call to mind tasteful presentation and delicious food.

At least it didn’t before my dinner at Fortnight last Friday. The theme for the second edition of the buzzed-about pop-up restaurant was indeed “Dumpster Diving,” scrawled across the top of the menu in probably the nicest script ever used to write that phrase. I was mildly skeptical, but Fortnight won me over with a pleasantly pretentious, often bizarre, and uniformly excellent meal.

It takes a lot for a student venture to stand out here, yet despite opening only once every two weeks and serving only 60 guests when it does, Fortnight has become what every group to petition for UOC funding secretly wants to be: a conversation topic, a news event, a campus-wide social smash hit.

Novelty, I think, is part of the allure: the cognitive dissonance of a functional restaurant opening in a dorm basement nearly gave my visiting friend an aneurysm. And Fortnight is, if you were wondering, a functional restaurant, boasting everything a “real” restaurant might (except salad plates, but we’ll get to that). They take reservations, which according to Rumpchat are quite difficult to get; they make you pay a not insignificant sum for your meal, although given the quality it’s well worth it. The servers all wear black and take tips, even if you might have worked on a problem set with the person that’s refilling your water. The whole operation feels distinct from just about anything else your fellow students put on here, because Fortnight’s whole conceit is that it’s not just another student group, but rather a professional endeavor that just happens to be staffed by students. Unlike roommates duty-bound to attend a “jam,” the couples packing the Davenport Dive for Fortnight’s opening service on Valentine’s Day were simply going out to dinner.

If the staff of Fortnight is going to ask us to take them seriously, they have to ask the same of themselves. Rest assured that they do, in a fairly charming way. The menu refers to Fortnight not as a pop-up restaurant, as I had been calling it, but as a “Kitchen Studio.” That new-age “food as art” (it’s a kitchen studio) vibe only gets stronger with themed menus, from last week’s “Dumpster Diving” to Valentine’s Day’s “Stages of a Relationship,” which dictated that waiters pour soup straight at the table to represent falling in love. Maybe it was that same “creative license” that resulted in me cutting through the newspaper tablecloth in an attempt to eat my “Garbage Salad”: in lieu of a plate, I had received wax paper.

Forgive them if it’s a little much at times, for a few reasons. First of all, the impulse that turns soup-pouring into performance art is the same visionary impulse that led to this whole thing even happening in the first place; if Fortnight’s masterminds didn’t feel such a strong sense of mission, there would be no Fortnight. Secondly, half of the fun lies in accepting the conceit that you aren’t in the dive, but rather some quaint Brooklyn bistro that you alone know about. Finally, and most importantly, cut them some slack because the food is excellent. Who cares where they pour the soup if the soup tastes good? So what if they used words like “braised” on the menu if they do, in fact, braise things really well? From my “Garbage Salad” eaten off of wax paper to the deconstructed Oreo dessert, the menu items complemented each other and demonstrated an impressive ability on the part of head chef Lucas Sin, DC ’15, to put together flavors and textures.

I know I’ve written above at length about Fortnight’s desire to be not just another student project, and it’s not. But wanting to go above and beyond a student project is perhaps the essence of an excellent student project: collegiate in the ambitious, professional sense of the word. But there’s another side to college, and Fortnight is also collegiate in the stoned-out-of-your-mind-and-starving-at-3:00 a.m. sense of the word. Their culinary influences are hard to pin down, but I’d venture a guess as to one: the munchies. The “K.F.C.” cauliflower appetizer is garnished with Wenzel dust; the “Cold Pizza” dessert includes “bacon jam,” which I would have thought to be a Grateful Dead song rather than a culinary item.

But Fortnight’s weird side makes for outstanding results, none more so than their “Cold Pizza” desert featuring the aforementioned bacon jam atop a biscuit with honey-ricotta ice cream and candied cherry tomatoes. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first: was it a dessert? An appetizer that had wandered to the back of the menu? It’s a truly bizarre creation, and the line between inspiration and insanity is a thin one. But like I said, I try to keep an open mind, so I dug into my “Cold Pizza” with gusto, not caring what the hell it was. And it turns out that it was, like everything else on the menu, exquisite. That’s the trick at Fortnight: just go with it. Suspend disbelief, eat with an open mind, dumpster dive: they’ll take care of the rest. Although a salad plate would have been nice.

I’m not a punk, but Speedy Ortiz made be want to be, and that’s saying something. It’s hard to maintain punk credentials while making music that people without said credentials can enjoy; maybe that’s the definition of punk. Regardless, Speedy Ortiz achieved that rare middle ground on their 2013 debut by mixing dissonant guitars and twisted rhythms with a sexy female singer, an acrid wit, and a proper respect for their indie-rock forbearers (Exhibit A: before singing for Speedy, Sadie Dupuis was in a Pavement cover band called “Babement”).  The result was an album that had as many jagged edges and squalls of feedback as it did moments of nuance and unadulterated, lighter-waving rock ‘n’ roll oomph.

On follow-up EP Real Hair, the Northampton, Massachusetts band smooth some of those edges, with mixed results. The cocktail of weird and wonderful that made Major Arcana such a fun ride has separated like oil and water. “American Horror’s” opening riff is accessible to the point of being uninteresting;it lacks the nastiness that lead guitarist Matt Robidoux flashed on tracks like “Tiger Tank.” Dupuis’s vocals still blend sneer with elegant and precise delivery, but her  words don’t weave in and out of the explosions her band sets off behind her.

Speedy Ortiz are still weird and witty. They still have a feel for big choruses and tricky grooves. Sadie Dupuis still delivers bizarre lines like “She’s a blade and I’m a donut” with that undeniably Malkmus-like snark. They just don’t do all those things at the same time like they did last time around. “Everything’s Bigger” is a reminder of how awesome “Major Arcana” was, and it’s a pretty good song, but maybe that’s just because Robidoux borrows his own riff from the aforementioned “Tiger Tank.” The rest of the EP should have followed suit.

The first minute and 35 seconds of Bombay Bicycle Club’s fourth album, So Long, See You Tomorrow, features zero guitars. “So what?” you might ask. Indeed, there are plenty of albums whose first 1:35 features no guitar. But it’s worth noting here because the first 1:27 of Bombay Bicycle Club’s (BBC) 2009 debut features nothing but guitars. Through its early years, BBC was a guitar band, and a fairly competent one at that. But it wasn’t just a guitar band; it was every guitar band to venture across the pond with axes held chest-high and eager, young, very pale hearts on their sleeves. They managed to sound like U2 and the Clash and Foals and Coldplay and Bloc Party all at the same time without ever actually sounding like any of them. The truth is that BBC’s music was so effortless to listen to and apparently to make that you couldn’t help but think it derivative or artificial in some way, even if you couldn’t pin down exactly how. Still, the London foursome didn’t get much credit (at least in the States) for churning out pleasant, consistent guitar rock that translated almost verbatim live. And the least inspiring origin story ever—three well-off white kids and a well-off Indian kid, all the sons of professional musicians, who named their band after an Indian takeout restaurant—did little to dispel their image as predictable and unimaginative.

Perhaps that perception got under the band’s skin, or perhaps they grew tired of sounding like a pasty British rock band par excellence. In any case, So Long, See You Tomorrow completes the transformation begun on 2011’s ornate A Different Kind of Fix, betraying almost no trace of the fuzzed-out, angled riffs that defined the first half of BBC’s career. Replacing it are waves of loops and synths, sparkling production and intricate arrangements that, at their best, retain BBC’s ear for hooks and propulsive songwriting while sounding unlike anything they’ve ever done. The band has tried to transform itself in the past, venturing from rock into folk and then back again, without ever conquering the middle tiers of festival lineups or critics’ evaluations. And while layering on gloss and having pretty women with pretty voices sing your choruses aren’t exactly novel ways to expand your audience, they’re executed here with enough skill that this new iteration of BBC might just catch on.

The first thing you notice isn’t the lack of guitars, but the wall of sound that’s replaced them. Clarinets, mandolins, saxophones, strings: it’s an instrument party. BBC doesn’t sound like a band anymore; few if any tracks are driven by a drumbeat. But despite winking at the listener with an opening track called “Overdone,” the album presents a coherent whole. Credit goes to front man Jack Steadman, who wrote, arranged, and co-produced the album; in fact, So Long is more arranged than composed, focused on the stacking of components rather than their forward motion, and it’s Steadman’s touch that keeps towers of noise like the title track and “Home By Now” from crumbling. “Luna,” a highlight, combines panpipes with percussive loops before exploding into the kind of shiver-inducing chorus that you know BBC have longed to write since day one. Steadman, who travelled in Africa and Asia between albums, has his obligate Beatles moment on the Indian-flute-inflected “Feel,” while “Come To” combines Rae Morris’s floating vocals with a wavering synthesizer and a shimmering guitar tone borrowed from shoegazers Slowdive, yet another pale English band whose sound BBC now have under their belt. Perhaps the most striking sonic departure is “Carry Me,” which, with it’s dub-infused verse and snapping snare rolls, is by a fair margin the closest to danceable that BBC has ever sounded.

At first listen, sounds like these have almost nothing to do with the group’s earlier music. A Different Kind of Fix was a step in this new direction; So Long is a quantum leap. But if Steadman is working with new tools this time around, he’s using them in familiar ways. BBC’s traditional calling cards are hard to spot, but they’re present nonetheless: interlocking melodies, easy chords, unremarkable but unoffensive lyrics. When they fuse with his new sonic options on album highlight “Home By Now,” the result is breathtaking.

Not that the album is devoid of growing pains. Steadman’s instincts serve him well, but the effortless ease with which BBC glided through its earlier, simpler material is basically gone. You can imagine them in the studio, twirling knobs on their controllers and other fancy machines, asking each other, “What if we tried this?” Sometimes, these experiments succeed; the choppy, video-game piano on “Home By Now” proves as much. But songs that wander too far sag under their own weight. As a guitar band, BBC generated huge amounts of propulsion. Their guitar lines, if not adventurous, at least never got stale or suffocating. That’s a risk on an album as dense as So Long, and the weakest moments are those that find Steadman and co. too eager to discard the guitar-fueled energy that got them where they are. When BBC forget that they are in fact a band rather than the DJ setup in their lead singer’s basement, the results are listless and overwrought.

The fact of the matter is that even if BBC’s best moments on So Long acknowledge its strengths as a rock band, BBC no longer sounds like one. Instead, they prove to those who dismissed them for not having their own sound that there was always more to them than met the ear. In the grand scheme of production-driven sonic reinventions, it’s no Achtung Baby, but that’s an unfair comparison; it took a band as great as U2 to switch gears so totally and so triumphantly. But just like that U2 classic, So Long, See You Tomorrow is a demonstration of staying power. Bombay Bicycle Club has (mostly) successfully abandoned the archetypal sound that most assumed they were married to. They’ve outlasted themselves, and in more ways than one: the restaurant for which they are named folded a few years ago.

Any student of microeconomics can tell you about the right to free disposal. It’s the assumption that more stuff can’t possibly make you worse off, that having options or excess can never be a bad thing.

And this is one of the big differences (there are many, thank god) between economic theory and good music. Give a musician too many sounds—too many colors to paint with—and what you often get is a thicket of noise with no light filtering through the cracks. Once you have the tools, the temptation to use them is always there.

As an indie musician well versed in electronic production, ceo’s Eric Berglund seems likely to fall into the trap. Wonderland, ceo’s second and latest album, opens with a spoken sound bite: “I felt like I opened Pandora’s box,” states a male voice, “and now I have to close it.” The question for the rest of the album is whether Berglund can in fact keep Pandora’s box closed and steer clear of excess, camp, and over-stimulation.

At first glance, an opener titled “Whorehouse” doesn’t bode well for an album aiming at restraint. But Berglund surprisingly succeeds; he crafts an album that displays all the hallmarks of being overwrought and overenthusiastic—disembodied voices, pinging synthesizers, a song called “OMG”—without any of the music actually being overwrought. Wonderland is tasteful and colorful and catchy as all hell, all of Berglund’s millions of components somehow fitting together coherently.

The line between taste and a lack thereof, however, is a thin one, and while Berglund manages to walk it for most of the album, it leaves him little room to maneuver. The result is an album that, for all its distinct moving parts, manages to sound quite similar from one song to the next (some of the best moments are departures in tonality, like the slinky “Mirage). But if you’re going to stick to a sound for an entire album, the one ceo chooses is a good one on Wonderland: danceable, weirdly beautiful, and certainly unique.