Interpol
Interpol
Matador, September 7, 2010
One of my favorite parts of my favorite Martin Scorsese movie Casino is this tremendous line reading from Sharon Stone. DeNiro, playing her casino-boss husband, just had her lowlife pimp ex-boyfriend beat up in front of her and she’s completely devastated, as well as fucked up on painkillers. She murmurs something DeNiro doesn’t catch, and when she repeats it she starts by saying “I said…” But God, the way she says it!
Those two words are so fraught with sadness and contempt that it’s like she can barely hold the parts of her mouth and throat necessary to say them together long enough to get them out. If you’ve ever gotten really, really, really low when someone you love has caused you unbearable pain or vice versa, maybe you’ve heard that sound before. Here, hear it again:
Man oh man how I love how Interpol’s Paul Banks delivers the first line of this song, the lead single from his band’s fourth, self-titled album. He plays with the vibrato in the last word of the phrase “All that I see” as self-consciously as anyone this side of Bryan Ferry, but instead of arch artifice it’s a sound of despair and disgust. This makes it a fitting metonymy for the whole record, a veritable concept album about how Interpol hates Interpol even more than you probably do. Unlike a lot of folks I’m unhesitatingly happy with this approach and pleased with the result.
Interpol has always been very good at sonically conjuring up huge spaces. On this album and its divisive, derided (even by the band itself, it seems) predecessor, the (understandably!) underrated Our Love to Admire, they then take the defiant/ill-conceived (take yer pick) step of making these spaces unpleasant to inhabit. So you get that Ennio Morricone by way of Joy Division reverbed guitar from Daniel Kessler echoing out in all directions, bouncing off the walls provided by drummer Sam Fogarino and bassist Carlos D–but then Paul Banks comes in with his strident vocals and those short, repetitive, harsh riffs that sound like missing sections of that car-alarm sequence we all have memorized. In the past this trick often took a back seat to the more traditionally pleasant-sounding and hooky post-punk instrumentation and melodies of their single-ready up-tempo songs, your “Evil”s and “Slow Hands”es and “PDA”s and even “The Heinrich Maneuver”s and what have you. (Frankly, in the context of the more readily appealing material on the band’s debut Turn on the Bright Lights, for example, songs that didn’t take off in that way–“Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down,” even the revered “Obstacle 1”–had a tendency to get on my nerves after a while.)
Here, however, the peppiest track is also arguably the most strident of the bunch: “Barricade” uses that trademark klaxon-like guitar sound to literally evoke the authorities walling off an area, and Banks shouts about it at the vocal-cord-straining top of his register. “Try It On” is maybe the one cathartic moment on the record–that is, it would be, if it weren’t these uncertain falsetto voices repeating the title phrase over and over, which then degenerate into hoarse shouting of same. And structurally, the song’s basically a long verse followed by a long chorus and then that’s it, like some Franz Kafka version of “Don’t Stop Believin’.” There’s nothing to get behind here like the anthems of their first two records. The good times done rolled away.
There’s something deceptive about calling out individual tracks on this album–as with Our Love to Admire I think it’s best experienced as an album, an extended stay in a place inhabited by people who at first made music that reflected unhappiness and increasingly came to embody it, specifically unhappiness with themselves. Indeed it’s tough to talk about Interpol without calling back to Banks’s excoriating This Is Hardcore-like self-satire of his own excesses on Our Love, like “No I in Threesome” and “Rest My Chemistry” and so on. That’s the context needed to understand why the lyrics that appear like briefly solid ghosts amid this album’s sonic tomb–“I’m a good guy,” “The winter will be wonderful,” “Always thought you had great style, and style is worthwhile”–ring so horribly false.
But this is not to say that individual songs don’t contain memorable stylistic flourishes. I was really struck by the guitar curlicue/drum groove of “Safe Without,” echoed by a similarly structured piano-and-percussion loop on “Try It On,” which then shows up again in “All of the Ways.” “Lights,” the hands-down standout, makes the band’s best use yet of that low, ominous piano, and adds a relative rarity, high sustained guitar notes, into the mix as well. Throughout the record there’s an increased presence of backing vocals–I don’t wanna say “harmonies”–and a tendency to record Fogarino like he’s drumming for a completely different band you can hear from a radio playing down the hall. And you’re gonna remember album closer “The Undoing,” which flirts with major-key uplift before drifting off into something like a morose incantation, and which when coupled with the cover art and the departure of iconic bassist Carlos D following the recording of this record is a pretty clear summation of Interpol‘s theme. I don’t think you’d wanna live here, but it’s a fascinating place to visit, especially in light of how easily the band could have jumped from second-album songs like “Evil” and “Not Even Jail” into making arena-filling crowdpleasers for the rest of its existence. These songs could fill an arena, but they’d make it feel empty and lonely even if it were packed to the rafters.