Moving up to a major label has hardly lifted Interpol's spirits. This is a good thing. Even with the twisted Wild Kingdom album cover and bassist Carlos Dengler's unexpected Wild West makeover, on its third studio album the black-clad New York quartet still sounds inflexibly menacing, grasping tighter than ever to its doomy post-punk influences and delving further into frontman Paul Banks's emotional unrest. Everything sounds a little bigger and brighter, sure, but at their core songs like "Rest My Chemistry" and "Wrecking Ball" are heroically sinister, goaded on by prickly riffs and slow-bleeding rhythms. The group briefly jumps to life on the buzzing "Heinrich Manouver" and exhibits an unexpected dash of humor on "No I in Threesome," but it's the closing "Lighthouse" that best defines the set--a late-night lament that simply steals away into the dark. --Aidin Vaziri
Review by Heather Phares
Though Our Love to Admire is technically Interpol's first major-label album, the way the band attempted to streamline the gorgeously dark atmospherics of Turn on the Bright Lights into something more marketable on Antics made that album feel more like their big-time debut than this album does. On Our Love to Admire, Interpol spends roughly half their time following Antics' gameplan of distilling their sound into readily accessible hooks, and the other half stretching their sound with deluxe arrangements and filligrees like strings, brass, and keyboards (all of which are used to grandiose effect on "Wrecking Ball"). Our Love to Admire's poppy tracks have been polished into black patent leather brilliance: "No I in Threesome"'s jaunty, insistent rhythms and "The Heinrich Maneuver"'s relatively bright, bouncy attack show that Interpol has gotten better, or at least more accomplished, at transforming their sound into singles since Antics. More heartening news for Turn on the Bright Lights fans arrives on Our Love to Admire's ambitious tracks, some of which come close to touching the greatness of Interpol's debut. "Pioneer to the Falls" uses the album's expansive production to the hilt, beginning with elegantly treacherous guitars, strings, and pianos; Daniel Kessler's soaring guitar solo and Paul Banks' repeated entreaties of "you fly straight into my heart" feel like the musical equivalent of storm clouds clearing. The song is filmic and full of ideas, and updates the spirit behind Turn on the Bright Lights without rehashing its sound slavishly. "Mammoth" is another standout, a tense yet hypnotic rocker that builds into a graceful fury around the refrain "spare me the suspense" and the band's relentless rhythm section. However, two of the prettiest songs vie for the title of the album's strongest track: "Rest My Chemistry" is Our Love to Admire's languid, luminous centerpiece (and the song that most clearly recalls Turn on the Bright Lights' magic), while the album's spare, vulnerable finale, "The Lighthouse," boasts some of Banks' most natural, affecting vocals yet. When Our Love to Admire falters -- and it falters a fair amount of the time -- it's because Interpol's attention to atmosphere and detail outpaces the songwriting. At this point the band is so professional that songs like "The Scale," "Who Do You Think?," and "Pace Is the Trick" can sound good in the moment, but fail to leave a lasting impression. With nearly as many awkward moments as inspired ones, Our Love to Admire is a somewhat schizophrenic listening experience. It feels like half of an album by a band making sure their songs that fit the mold of what they've done before, and half of an album by a band using their major-label leverage to push their boundaries. Who knows which version of the band will prevail, but there are just enough interesting songs on Our Love to Admire to suggest that they can't be written off entirely just yet.
Interpol
Our Love to Admire
[Capitol; 2007]
Rating: 6.0
Despite its title, Interpol's 2002 debut Turn on the Bright Lights was marked by its seductive shadowiness. The product of a bygone New York City filled with dank alleys and smoke-choked dives, Interpol fed on their own mystery while translating cool kid record collections into sexy downtown paranoia. They received a few positive notices, too. In the glowing Pitchfork review of the LP, Eric Carr wrote, "Although it's no Closer or OK Computer, it's not unthinkable that this band might aspire to such heights." And now-- after the tight, familiar turns of 2004's Antics and a major label deal-- their lofty aspirations are finally kicking in.
Horns, extended outros, strings, an oboe, and album art featuring more than three colors-- welcome to the new world of Interpol. Our Love to Admire is the sound of a minted Madison Square Garden band seeking to freshen its damp atmospherics. It's not a terrible idea: On Antics, even Interpol seemed tired of Interpol, capping the disc's 10 tracks with a couple drawn-out duds. But, as anyone who's bought laundry detergent knows, "new and improved" does not always mean "new" or "improved." Admire's predictable adornments quickly prove fleeting and expose Interpol's nagging limitations rather than their potential.
With cleaner production and an arsenal of instruments at their disposal, the group indulges, and the songs often suffer. Tracks like six-minute opener "Pioneer to the Falls" and the limp lowlight "Scale" grate due to overly repetitive song structures that rely too heavily on choppy breakdowns and pointless solos. And the band's previously economical songwriting, built on quick, bursting hooks and seamless transitions, is now grand, stately, and bloated-- more like a depressing U2 than a poppy Joy Division.
While it would be easy (and probably accurate) to blame Admire's flaws on the group's heightened commercial ambitions, that's only part of the problem. With their first two LPs, Interpol vaulted over like-minded contemporaries thanks to their superior interplay between rhythm and melody. Instead of letting Banks and guitarist Daniel Kessler dominate songs with their trebly timbres, bassist Carlos D. and drummer Sam Fogarino provided perfect complements, at times overshadowing their bandmates altogether. (Just listen to the loping low-end of "Untitled" or the stutter-step snares on "Evil" for proof.) But Admire finds the band's balance shifting significantly; the rhythm players often seem more like glorified session men than integral components of a sleek post-punk machine. Gone are the death-disco grooves that made "Slow Hands" and "Obstacle 1" strangely danceable, and without those dynamic rhythmic counterpoints, the tempos slacken, songs drag, and the focus inevitably turns to Banks' increasingly frustrating word splatters.
Banks has always been a between-the-lines lyricist-- his default is somewhere between opaque and lazy free association. With each new song, though, it becomes less certain that there was ever anything worth searching for between the lines in the first place. On Admire, he's slightly more overt, but this time his gripes with the opposite sex sometimes take on a surreal 80s rock star quality. "No I in Threesome", ostensibly about convincing a girlfriend to invite her friend into bed, is either a hilarious parody of an embarrassingly self-serious Paul Banks song-- or just an embarrassingly self-serious menage a blah. (It's not both.) "The Heinrich Maneuver" rails against a cold-hearted, phony, manipulative actress (shocking!) and "Rest My Chemistry" has the singer grappling with an eternal query: Can you ever be too worn out on drugs to have sex with a young groupie? (A young groupie subject to head-smacking lines like, "You look so young like a daisy in my lazy eye," no less.) More than ever, Banks tries to add some sympathy to his reedy robot croon and nearly succeeds on the wistful "Wrecking Ball". Still, when he monotones, "I've got this soul, it's all fired up," he sounds as thrilled as a sleepy Stephen Hawking.
On "Threesome", Banks suggests, "It's time we give something new a try." And his quest for a guilt-free three-way is as doomed as Interpol's dalliances with heavy-handed, big-budget gestures on Admire. Can they make an OK Computer or Closer? At this point, another Antics would suffice.
-Ryan Dombal, July 10, 2007
http://www.myspace.com/interpol
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