Artist: Interpol
Label: Capitol Records
Release: 2007
It was only a matter of time before a major label snapped up Interpol. After a huge breakthrough with their debut “Turn On The Bright Light” (2002), and then again with “Antics” (2004), the guys’ confidence had grown. They wanted to try something completely new, something different. “Our Love To Admire” is the first Interpol album where they bring keyboards into their sound, and it’s also a record with far more atmospheric color and thematic variety than its predecessor. The “status quo” label no longer applies to the band with “Our Love To Admire,” and Interpol are successfully moving up and onward. The band’s fans will have to be able to get past that label too, since some of them probably wanted the story from the first two albums to simply carry on.
The band’s courage to explore shows right in the opener, Pioneer To The Falls. It’s a slowed-down rhythmic crawl that surprises with the impulsiveness of its blunt, craggy pulse, which actually conjures the image of tons of rock slowly rolling off a chipped-away ledge high in the mountains. The track gets room to breathe from Kessler’s typical simple single-string motif, a guitar bark that further tears through the ether with heavy use of reverb, building on the clean, natural guitar tone pushed back into the distance. What brings the icy chill into the atmosphere, though, is the unmistakably hollow, single-layered singing of Paul Banks – the strongest of all Interpol’s trademarks when it comes to their own artistic identity in rock music. After choosing a start like this, one you could almost call a progressive musical requiem, the keyboards filling out the background are a real surprise. The atmosphere is solid and convincingly predatory, and the mood of the album is cataclysmic throughout, gloomy and irreversible, very, very “European melancholic.” No I In Threesome is basically a rockabilly tune, but cunningly twisted to the max thanks to Banks’s spine-chilling vocals, no chordal guitar stance, and the atmospheric cloak of the keyboards. Brilliantly disguised recycling, hats off, guys! The dense atmospheric condensation gathers once more in the listener’s associative cortex with the creeping The Scale. The album only gets a mild shot of adrenaline with The Heinrich Manuever, where things finally shift into a higher gear in a proper rock way. This is a typical Interpol number, proof of the band’s great skill at encoding rock’n’roll templates into their own recognizable musical expression. It’s the moment that (atmospherically, and even the hint itself is a happy accident) brings Interpol close to the recent history of dark post-punk from the late eighties (single-string repetitive picking, a decisive bass line with strong contrast in between, and Banks’s fleeting, Joy Division-style vocals). Mammoth is an upgrade of the previous track. It’s so simple in the riff that the elementary riff divide between, say, Queens Of The Stone Age and Interpol gets blurred at this point, but of course the vibe in Mammoth is from a whole other planet (the Interpol planet). Who Do You Think?, near the end of the album, gets atmospherically very close to Mammoth. A mix of simple moves stacked together “the Interpol way.” Alongside Pioneer To The Falls, Pace Is The Trick is the second moment on the record that reaches a higher level of positive receptor excitement in the inventiveness of its basic motif. Kessler’s plain, monotonous “dangling” on two or three notes is a surprise here, and it confirms in the same breath just how essential Interpol are in their own particular take on the legacy of rock music. The third moment when the ears really perk up is Rest My Chemistry. The contrast in the chorus is outstanding, between the brittle single-string melody and the rocky rhythm line, which turns to stone in the pre-chorus with a blunt guitar riff. The distinctive melody points to wit and freshness of ideas, and the song is full of sonic contrasts, topped off with Banks’s sensual vocal approach. Wrecking Ball is the moment of higher experimentation on the new record, and it starts relentlessly firing rivets into “Our Love To Admire,” as if it were a container of cerebral palsy drowning in a lake of dreams, a perfectly chaotic psychedelia, wandering toward the abyss of doom. But that’s only the warm-up, because the closing The Lighthouse, continuing in that vein, finally rivets the album shut with a mercy shot and numbs it completely, atmospherically. Blackness as far as the eye can see, welcome!
“Our Love To Admire” also has all the hallmarks of the Interpol sound and style. What’s more, the band’s sound and style have evolved, which proves that Interpol are a band with an unbending streak of courage to explore the limits of their own artistry, and in this case, with the freshness the new record offers, it has blossomed on fertile ground in every respect. “Our Love To Admire” is a damn good album that keeps all the trademarks of Interpol. At the same time it proves the band is capable of growing by bringing fresh elements into their sound and style while holding on to the core attributes of their own recognizability, which few bands can offer today. So Interpol are one of those young bands from the turn of the millennium that, surprisingly, managed to catch the rhythm of healthy evolutionary progress, which is certainly not the guiding principle of the music industry today, an industry that artificially creates and destroys bands based on the cautious calculation of guaranteed profit, with no questions asked about the artistic potential of these artificial “creations” (read: bands). Let’s hope that, against that backdrop, Interpol’s authentic development, as confirmed so productively by “Our Love To Admire,” lasts as long as possible.
Line-up
Paul Banks – vocals, guitar
Daniel Kessler – guitar, backing vocals
Carlos Dengler – bass guitar
Sam Fogarino – drums
Production
Interpol & Rich Costey
Tracklist
1. Pioneer To The Falls
2. No I In Threesome
3. Scale
4. Heinrich Maneuver
5. Mammoth
6. Pace Is The Trick
7. All Fired Up
8. Rest My Chemistry
9. Who Do You Think
10. Wrecking Ball
11. Lighthouse
Album length: 47.03
