Ah, the 2000s, when the anxiety of influence flowed free…
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[5.45]
Micha Cavaseno: Apparently if you remove Carlos D from Interpol, we finally discover a hidden truth: they are, and always have been, a surf rock band at heart. These organs and scraping seagull guitar chimes have always been here, but they’ve been marred by the plodding of their supposed “brain” and his ’80s fetishism getting pinned unfairly onto the band — nobody mistakes these guys for a screamo band just because their old drummer was in Saetia, after all. The new trick is a spring in their step; the goth-ball & chain gets cast into the sea, and these guys careen with a little less precision. It doesn’t help Interpol from sounding a bit tired, and the song’s kind of thrown-together bits, but it’s a growing pain that might reveal something new for those of us who stuck around this long.
[5]
Alfred Soto: A mess: Paul Banks’ vocal and Daniel Kessler’s riff fight like two sixth graders in the cafeteria line, and while I appreciate that the chorus shows evidence of caffeine ingestion, the idea of Interpol being straightforward and without awful taste is as unappealing as their 2002 debut.
[4]
Josh Langhoff: Not realizing their band’s entire sound was a dry husk by 1983, the Interpudlians also throw in a couple antiphonal clichés: the ironically quaint title phrase and “maybe half the time,” because if Interpol guy told you how hard/often/comically his characters actually fall, you might laugh, and in Interpol’s world laughter is best approximated through grim-lipped expressions of knowingness. I laughed anyway — at the end, when the deep voiced dude starts singing along to the clichés like they mean something.
[3]
Rebecca A. Gowns: Turn on the Bright Lights will always be a favorite album of mine, but a lot can change in 12 years. Or not change, as it were — their music still sounds like the mutterings of an insomniac set in dreamy reverb. They’re hitting all the same marks, technically. Perhaps it’s everything else that has changed. What used to sound like a wistful sort of cynicism now sounds crass; what used to sound like a young man starting to fight against encroaching ennui now sounds like an out-of-touch old dude ensconced in it.
[3]
Jonathan Bradley: There is no shame in doing one thing well and doing it again and again; think Robyn, Phoenix, and Placebo. Interpol’s job is to turn metropolitan loneliness into something abyssal and romantic, as if Derek Zoolander’s brain had been transplanted into The National’s collective skull. “All the Rage Back Home,” for all the haemorrhaged distance of the vocal, almost sounds sunny. Tragic all-nighters are only fun until the dawn.
[4]
W.B. Swygart: Weirdly, the best thing this does is forget to go away. The opening is negligible (man has pedal, lots of lines beginning with “she said” in the manner that makes me wonder why people still bother listening to things), but as it thumps and squalls on, I start getting sucked in; by the time it’s into its second minute of doing exactly the same thing over and over again, while Banks’s vocal goes fully gazing-three-feet-left, I’m pretty much under, legs twitching and shoulders jagging like an 18-year-old who feels the need to explain his methods for drinking bourbon to you for about an hour. There’s nothing especially special going on here, it’s just that these shoes are very comfortable.
[7]
Jer Fairall: Speaking as someone who has resolved never to listen to a new Interpol album ever again, this catches me off guard a little, at least as long as Paul Banks is attacking his words with a brittle, punk-like ferocity rarely heard from a vocalist who tends to mute his delivery in the mistaken impression that brooding and significance are inherently complementary. The band’s keen sense of atmosphere has saved worse banalities than this before, and if they can no longer get my pulse racing, I take it as a minor triumph that I am neither bored nor annoyed by this.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: I have never listened to an Interpol song before now. At first it was circumstance; lately, it’s being scared off by critic-types and their admonitions. Tastemakers talk about Interpol with the same tones that DARE officers talk about marijuana — or actually probably PCP, as from what I can tell being caught liking them in 2014 doesn’t just seem bad but embarrassing. Knowing this, the solemn, deep-voiced verses were about what I expected, and what I was afraid would press my buttons. The jaunty chorus is ignorable. I don’t know whether a “happily” goes there or not.
[5]
David Turner: I have never been to New York City. I don’t think I’ve heard an Interpol song recorded after 2002. I’m trying to make my way to New York City this fall, and maybe I should make way through Interpol’s discography ’cause this is pretty chill. Also have no idea where they filmed someone surfing an aluminium wave, but again, that’s chill.
[7]
Brad Shoup: I recently spent a couple days chatting over email with another TSJ writer; she and I were comparing notes on how, specifically, Interpol have always squicked us out. We agreed, I think, that shedding the bassist helped the band spiritually and sonically, if not us. I can’t really parse the text here — too many clauses mucking things up, and I’m inclined to interpret the vocals (hollow, and authoritative in a majorly unearned way) uncharitably. But there’s something about the self-awareness in the lines “I keep falling/Maybe half the time/Maybe half the time”: the thrill of suddenly knowing yourself, and the bummer of knowing how far this doesn’t get you. Finally, the manacles are off the drummer, and the squealed guitar lines write unease over all this rock-dude authority posing.
[8]
Megan Harrington: I’ve long felt that Interpol’s inability to produce anything that measured up to Turn on the Bright Lights was a byproduct of foisting significance on a half liter of douchebags. A decade later, there’s nothing at stake. They can pick up their prickly guitar lines and match them with shout-along backing vocals without worrying that someone might spot the incongruity. Interpol are finally free to be the meaningless good time they always were.
[8]