Album review: Interpol
Interpol
Our Love To Admire
Label: Parlophone
Release date: 9th July 2007
www.interpolnyc.com
Rating: 5 out of 5
If you’ve spent the last two and a half years waiting with baited breath for the third album from NYCs finest, listening to Our Love To Admire will come as something of a hallelujah moment for you, the heavens parting and jubilant seraphim descending from the clouds, manna raining down from paradise. Seriously, folks - it’s just that good.
The album opens with Pioneer To The Falls, its eerie, stalking soundscape shot through with Slavic motifs. It’s all angles and corners, like some German Expressionist film – Dr Caligari’s somnambulist crawling the jagged streets or Nosferatu curling round chimneystacks. At first it seems odd to open the album with what seems like a slow-burner but as the song progresses, you realise what a perfect choice it is; chilly, dramatic, elegant and the perfect introduction to the album.
What Interpol do best are bitter, poisonous songs of longing, possessive desire and frustration; happily, this album has them in spades. No I in Threesome and The Scale are lilting staggers through the charred ruins of decimated relationships. Wrecking Ball continues the theme and shows that the band are not all cruel façade and Teutonic posturing. It’s the kind of song you listen to in the gin-sodden early hours of the morning after a wretched break-up. Elegiac, it should make you sadder but has instead a kind of restorative effect, its shards of glacial sound piercing through like dawn light spilling through curtains.
All Fired Up sees the band mixing strident lyrics - "I got this soul/It's all fired up" - with a drumbeat that weaves in and around the guitars like a prize-fighter, daring you to drop your guard and take a shot. Paul Banks sings "I dream of you draped in wires and leaning on the brakes/As I leave you with restless liars and dealers on the take" and the tableau is complete; this noir world, with its sinister thematic drive is Interpol. It is to their eternal credit that they manage to convey a sense of conviction and authenticity where so many have tried and failed. In Mammoth, the refrain "Spare me the suspense" is the apogee of the disdainful, seen-it-all ennui that marks much of modern life.
Who Do You Think is similar to the big hits from Antics – C'mere and Slow Hands - where the whip crack of the drums spurs on the rumbling bass and firecracker guitars, Banks' lyrical phrasing simply unbeatable. A shimmering example of modern rock music at its sublime best.
Amazing too is Pace Is The Trick, a track so gloriously confident and poised that it’s easy to see Interpol up there in the leagues of world-beating stadium filling bands like U2. The difference is that through the course of their career to date, Interpol appear to have remained true to themselves, refining and honing their sound to perfection and never straying into faddishness or parody.
In the savage pound of their drums and the brownstone elegance of their melodies, Interpol are NYC through and through. In current single The Heinrich Maneuvre, Banks sings "How are things on the West Coast?"; it’s clear that his lover couldn’t be further away. The "West Coast" is California – silicone, sunshine and The American Dream. Interpol, pale and interesting, prefer to skulk in city shadows, stoking dark dystopian fantasies and fondling their sordid obsessions.
Our Love To Admire
Label: Parlophone
Release date: 9th July 2007
www.interpolnyc.com
Rating: 5 out of 5
If you’ve spent the last two and a half years waiting with baited breath for the third album from NYCs finest, listening to Our Love To Admire will come as something of a hallelujah moment for you, the heavens parting and jubilant seraphim descending from the clouds, manna raining down from paradise. Seriously, folks - it’s just that good.
The album opens with Pioneer To The Falls, its eerie, stalking soundscape shot through with Slavic motifs. It’s all angles and corners, like some German Expressionist film – Dr Caligari’s somnambulist crawling the jagged streets or Nosferatu curling round chimneystacks. At first it seems odd to open the album with what seems like a slow-burner but as the song progresses, you realise what a perfect choice it is; chilly, dramatic, elegant and the perfect introduction to the album.
What Interpol do best are bitter, poisonous songs of longing, possessive desire and frustration; happily, this album has them in spades. No I in Threesome and The Scale are lilting staggers through the charred ruins of decimated relationships. Wrecking Ball continues the theme and shows that the band are not all cruel façade and Teutonic posturing. It’s the kind of song you listen to in the gin-sodden early hours of the morning after a wretched break-up. Elegiac, it should make you sadder but has instead a kind of restorative effect, its shards of glacial sound piercing through like dawn light spilling through curtains.
All Fired Up sees the band mixing strident lyrics - "I got this soul/It's all fired up" - with a drumbeat that weaves in and around the guitars like a prize-fighter, daring you to drop your guard and take a shot. Paul Banks sings "I dream of you draped in wires and leaning on the brakes/As I leave you with restless liars and dealers on the take" and the tableau is complete; this noir world, with its sinister thematic drive is Interpol. It is to their eternal credit that they manage to convey a sense of conviction and authenticity where so many have tried and failed. In Mammoth, the refrain "Spare me the suspense" is the apogee of the disdainful, seen-it-all ennui that marks much of modern life.
Who Do You Think is similar to the big hits from Antics – C'mere and Slow Hands - where the whip crack of the drums spurs on the rumbling bass and firecracker guitars, Banks' lyrical phrasing simply unbeatable. A shimmering example of modern rock music at its sublime best.
Amazing too is Pace Is The Trick, a track so gloriously confident and poised that it’s easy to see Interpol up there in the leagues of world-beating stadium filling bands like U2. The difference is that through the course of their career to date, Interpol appear to have remained true to themselves, refining and honing their sound to perfection and never straying into faddishness or parody.
In the savage pound of their drums and the brownstone elegance of their melodies, Interpol are NYC through and through. In current single The Heinrich Maneuvre, Banks sings "How are things on the West Coast?"; it’s clear that his lover couldn’t be further away. The "West Coast" is California – silicone, sunshine and The American Dream. Interpol, pale and interesting, prefer to skulk in city shadows, stoking dark dystopian fantasies and fondling their sordid obsessions.
I just wish I could stay there with them.
Labels: album review, alternative, indie, Interpol, music
posted by YG&B at 1:41 PM
1 Comments:
"fondling their sordid obsessions"? Zeinab, Ms. Meisinger would have been proud. Sweet review - off to the russian mp3 sites we go!
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