Interpol's one of those bands that straddle the line between indie cool and mainstream not-cool, or so would say the legion of Pitchfork readers who think they're rad because they totally get Animal Collective. They can appreciate the things they're doing, and they remember when nobody knew who they were and Slow Hands was on their Friday evening listening-party ipod playlist, so they're given a free pass. But hey, they've achieved some mainstream appeal, so there're a lot of hipsters out there who have just been waiting for Interpol to do something really wrong, really outrageously lame, so that they can topple their mighty empire and stomp all over their artfully-askew fedoras.
Enter Interpol, the band's fourth studio album. What is it? Hard to say, but people hate it. Pitchfork hates it, and so most bloggers out there hate it. Well, I shouldn't say they hate it; to hate it would be to admit that there's something to hate about it. Worse than that, they're indifferent toward it. That's the killing stroke as far as indie music reviews go. "Not bad, didn't mind some of the songs...not much to say about it though, sounds like a famous band going through the motions." Ouch. Right in the nuts. (That was a paraphrase btw; read the article if you want the same thing said in 1,692 words).
And it's a fair enough response to an album that certainly took me some time (approximately two weeks, ha!) to warm up to. In fact, this is my second go-around at posting on this album: the first one was full of woe-begotten "To where hath mine comely maiden Interpol flown?" type epithets, and a lengthy description of my years of young-adulthood when I discovered Interpol and fell in love with guitars that sound like they're being played at the end of a very long hallway filled with funhouse mirrors.
But that post no longer exists. I deleted it, because something clicked in the last few days of listening to this album. It's like a Pinkerton situation, except that I always loved Pinkerton, even as a confused 11 year old who wasn't quite sure what the whole Pink Triangle thing was getting at. It's an album that you initially dismiss, but refuse to relegate. I even thought about trading it in. Trading it in! I don't even remember that last time I traded in a record. It was probably at Rogers Jukebox on Fort Street, and it was probably a Nada Surf record. That was a while ago, like, when-Much-Music-actually-played-rock-music-videos-before-1 AM long ago.
It persisted, like an Italian mountain climber. Little by little it won me over, with its repeatedly excellent drum hooks, and its surprising well-arrangedness. What I initially took for flecks of apathy in Paul Banks vocal delivery became a sense of artful fatigue.
Interpol is one of those bands that has very little left to express musically. They have an admittedly limited range of timbres in their four records so far, and there's a sense that anything resembling a guitar in the +/- 12 panoramic dials of centre would be anaethema to their characteristic sound, and maybe that will ultimately be their demise. And yet, they continue to write songs that expand upon their previous work. Interpol feels like a spiritual successor to Our Love to Admire both in terms of theme and style, but it continues in a vein that seems to be building towards something. What is that something? I have no idea. It could be a reinvention. It could be more of the same; or it could be a self-induced implosion. Either way, the band is going somewhere, despite the insinuation in the popular media that they're just pushing out material to fill the void and make a quick buck. I don't buy it. I hear growth on this album, it's just growth at a pace that is satisfying to the casual listener.
What's wrong with a band that likes the way they sound, and wants to keep producing music that sounds similar? There's something comforting about a band that knows what its strengths are, knows which sound best expresses what they're feeling, and can write a bunch o' songs along those lines. I mean, hell, they could keep writing ear-worm bass hooks and guitar one-off riffs as were found on Antics til the cows come home, but they've expanded on that sound. So it's taken them two albums to expand that sound to where they want it to be: so what?
The concept album is back in style, and as with the last record I talked about, Interpol is meant to be enjoyed in one sitting, front-to-back, in order. I'm usually a bit leery of this approach to album-making, as it takes what's so very powerful and beautiful about an album of music: the ability of each song to stand on its own two feet, while simultaneously reflecting the whole, and diminishes some aspect of that. This record, however, doesn't feel like a diminishing of the spirit of musicality: the songs are able to stand alone, and it wasn't until I read elsewhere that I learned that they're all following a theme. The Suburbs was the same way: it's a concept album, but it could easily not be a concept album. To achieve what it set out to, that is to provide a different listening experience as a body of work as well as a collection of single tracks, is a difficult feat, and one that I will give them credit for pulling off.
This is certainly not a single-heavy record. Those looking for the kind of infectious pop of "Evil" or "Slow Hands" or even "The Heinrich Maneuver." In fact, for all the talk in this review of progression, the album is most like Turn On the Bright Lights in that for all its effectiveness, it is not a pop record. The band has certainly taken a different approach, but it feels much like that first album in that it seems to be made entirely on their own terms.
So there it is. Is it a great album? No, probably not. I don't think it's a failure to live up to something, as most reviews have suggested: I don't think that the band is striving for immutable greatness. Instead, I think they're trying to express a feeling, and express it in as grand a way possible, and in that they perhaps come up a bit short. There was room for these songs to be refined into something better, more concrete, but that's not to say that the album's a failure. It's guaranteed to be quite unlike anything else in your music library--including other Interpol albums--and that's never a bad thing. I think once the band finds its new identity in its post-Carlos-D existence, the lessons learned on this record will yield some extraordinary results.
Recommendation: If you're a fan of the band, buy it. It will be something you can chew on for a while and grow to like, if not love. If you're new to Interpol, start elsewhere, with TOTBL or Antics. To be sure, there will be better uses of your money this year, but Interpol is an album you may enjoy investing some time and money into. After all, my favourite Interpol album is still Our Love to Admire, which the rest of the world seems to revile, so perhaps you as well will poo-poo the naysayers and find something of merit on this record.
PS - the album art is really quite tragic. It's like mid-90's AutoCAD gone wrong. What were they thinking?
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