Interpol
Our Love to Admire

Capitol Records 2007

By Andrew McLees

Interpol reserves a special place in my heart. When they released Turn On the Bright Lights I wasn’t tainted by any New York music-fetishist sensibility, didn’t give a shit about whether or not they were leeching off Joy Division, and most importantly, hadn’t experienced true excitement for an album since the ‘90s. Turn On the Bright Lights was new, engaging and unlike anything I’d heard. Granted, in retrospect Interpol was by no means an original band, but they sure as hell left a footprint in the tight ass of the indie scene like few bands since.

Unfortunately, nauseous self-awareness can creep up like mold on cheese, as Interpol and I have both apparently encountered. The band has weathered heavy-handed slaps from the jetsetter press and the type of frothing backlash that is an empty rite of passage today, and forces most bands to further and quickly carve their identities out of the images of their sound than allow for a slower, organic progression. Interpol has emerged from this as a bloated, overly ambitious mess, well aware that to abandon their caricature aesthetic means certain death—the non-romantic kind. Forgetting that the heavily single-minded Antics ever happened, with their third album, I can’t believe I’m listening to the same band. While I doubt anyone ever truly mistook Paul Bank’s monotonic psychobabble for Ian Curtis’s defeatism, or the high-gloss pose of Interpol’s misanthropic jangles for Joy Division’s dark well of hopelessness, Interpol’s music feels wholly unpleasant. Nothing here feels fresh or amounts to anything besides one shade of irksome, indulgent indie fodder.

The album’s first half is blatantly more interesting, juxtaposing their signature mid-tempo monotony with a hook-laden brute force. The brightest flare is signaled early and dies abruptly: “Mammoth.” Its every blast of snare perfectly compliments Banks’ urgent voice with the subtlety of being beat to death with a sandal in broad daylight. Aside from that glimmer of hope, Our Love to Admire reasserts Interpol as a window looking out on never-changing, desolate, bleak atmospherics. They are the soundtrack for when the sun implodes and everything on Earth dies, but that choice limits their music from genuinely reaching anyone outside their faithful choir of snobs and mallrats caught in arrested development.

This discourse of Interpol's Our Love to Admire is written by Andrew McLees for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.