[rating=1.50]
For a while, Interpol had a good thing going. Their debut, 2002’s Turn on the Bright Lights, came crashing hard out of the gates, full of fuzzed-out, slow-burning dirty gems that sounded fresh and original despite a ring of familiarity. Their sound continued to flesh out on their second LP, Antics, which found the band not necessarily re-creating their formula but tweaking it towards a faster, more hook-filled ensemble that actually got people dancing instead of staring at their shoes. 2007’s Our Love to Admire began to raise some red flags about the career trajectory of Interpol. Languished and sluggish, the album plodded along a sleepy path, jumping to life only every now and then with a peppier jam that only served to temporarily break up the monotony.
With their new self-titled LP, Interpol fail to awake from their nap and instead have created an album that wraps the listener in a blanket, slips them a sleeping pill and puts them to bed for the night. Loosely based on the concept of a disintegrating relationship, the band shuffles out one tired, mopey dirge after the next as they fail to give the listener any reason to care about the lyrics let alone turn up the volume dial and rock out. For nearly 50 minutes, these songs rarely escape the level of mid-tempo sludge. Occasionally on tracks like “Barricade” and “Safe Without” the opening 30 seconds will offer promise, but soon the band brings the pace to a crawl and slips back into melodrama, with lead singer Paul Banks uttering nonsense about driving ahead “full speed, half blind” and being “safe without it” over and over until the desire to skip to the next track is completely overwhelming.
The lyrical repetition, which Banks gratingly includes on nearly every song, reaches its apex on the penultimate track “All of the Ways”. Over a cacophony of muddy synthesizer and organ, Banks’ narrator confronts his assumed ex over the identity of her new man. Countless songs throughout the history of popular music have covered similar themes of betrayal, revelation, and ultimately confrontation, but rarely has a band made the process sound so lifeless and stilted. For five minutes and sixteen seconds, the song’s grinding progression ceaselessly beats home the point while Banks’ monotone drawl repeats the same phrase: “Make it up for me” over and over until one imagines his head exploding. In fact, that seems to be the only thing that will make the song end. And not to pick on Banks, but his voice, always an acquired taste, reaches its boiling point of tolerance on this album. While at one time I found Billy Corgan’s voice jagged and exciting, I also felt the same about Banks’ baritone channeling of Ian Curtis. That time has passed, however, as I found myself longing for a second lead singer to step up to the mike and take the reins for at least song.
If pressed to identify a positive about this album, I would point to the bass lines, which pulse strongly on each track and inject a strong dose of rock and roll swagger into the affair. It propels the band back to their halcyon days of the first two albums where you felt as if Interpol could conquer the world. Interestingly enough, Carlos Dengler, Interpol’s longtime bassist and de facto face of the band left shortly after the completion of this album. Perhaps frustrated with the lack of direction in this batch of songs or simply looking for another challenge, we don’t know the reasons for his departure, but after experiencing the chore of listening to this album, it is hard to blame Dengler for hitting the road. His last contribution to the band was a good one, if only the album could back up his efforts.
