Interpol by Interpol

In the beginning, Interpol did one thing, and they did it quite well. That thing could be described as plastic melancholia: the valiant reaching for the stars of Echo & the Bunnymen and The Cure only to wind up clutching at Hot Topic-brand straws. But the widely promulgated–albeit extremely facile–argument that they were little more than a poor man’s Joy Division seemed to justify the listening public’s writing Interpol off altogether, and so their second and third albums were largely ignored.

However, the group’s eponymous fourth album finds them venturing into new musical territory… at least superficially. For the most part, Interpol remain firmly situated in their musical comfort zone, dispatching diplomatic envoys to adjoining musical colonies in the interest of developing symbiotic trade relationships.

A song like "Memory Serves” typifies this point: it starts off with the group’s trademark shredded clean guitar with heavy reverb, leading into a verse sequence with endlessly repeating lyrics, but after about ninety seconds something miraculous happens: some kind of… chorus. Such songs are scarcely found in the group’s oeuvre (with the obvious example of "Evil" springing to mind, but you would be hard pressed to name five others) and it’s also one of the first Interpol songs to feature not only what appears to be actual "singing" from Paul Banks, but a two-part harmony. The introduction of synth-textures, Spanish language singing and a more polished and an extremely dry-sounding production style are also noteworthy departures from the group’s usual formula.

With "Summer Well" the group introduces a piano but, unfortunately, just lets a cat or something stumble across it and juxtaposes the outcome with a boring disco beat in a rambling incoherent structure sufficiently mired in Interpol’s Hot Topic-brand "straws" to never be mistaken for anything like avant-garde experimentation. Similarly, "Barricade" is a virtually incomprehensible mess and difficult to listen to, and "Always Malaise (The Man I Am)" is a tone deaf nightmare.

But the real problem is that the romantic gloom of the group’s first album seems to be gone and in its place is a gimmick: the work of a band expected to produce "dark" music to fill some sort of gap in the market. Added to which, there is a dearth of memorable melodies and in some cases a complete lack of anything remotely resembling a melody.

Interpol’s highlights, most of which occur in the album’s final twenty minutes, include "Success", the surprisingly funky "Memory Serves", "Safe Without", "Try It On" (which gains points for using the word "exhortation" in a rock lyric, but immediately loses them for throwing in an F-bomb for no apparent reason), and "The Undoing" which is just bizarre enough to work.