It’s partly a shame that Interpol’s musical trajectory was measured so closely against Joy Division. The depressive post-punk group eventually morphed into the techno-pop New Order, and Ian Curtis — who was suffocated by his own collapsing baritone laments — killed himself before his brand of apocalyptic post-punk could probe the depths of man any further.
But at the same time, the post-punk mentoring seemed to fit. Interpol’s lead vocalist Paul Banks’ stilted yet fragile delivery seemed to mimic Curtis while the bass-work of Carlos Dengler and the atmospheric background production of every track seemed to present the wasteland of post-modern humanity in stark relief.
But once you try to become your own band, emulation can’t be the default setting. Antics saw the group getting more direct, with songs like “Length of Love” and “C’mere” turning the longing for true human connection into the sound of yearning immediacy — songs that seemed to put the full force of the band behind expanding Banks’ fight against isolation. Interpol was at times almost sinister in its arrangement, and contained enough powerful bass and drum work to make for good driving music.
Our Love to Admire either did away with subtlety altogether by turning songs like “Mammoth” or “Heinrich Maneuver” into heavy head-bobbers or turned to minimalism in the last few songs of the album.
But when faced with the task of defining themselves as a band in their own right, the self-titled Interpol stalls. At this professional fork in the road, they choose to simply stand around and twiddle their thumbs. The result is a disappointing, half-finished, limp effort that makes their debut look like a fluke.
From the first track, something seems to be off. Yes, “Success” likely could have fit on either Antics or Our Love to Admire, but Banks’ vocals are searching for a melody that he never finds. Perhaps the free-range structure is supposed to be admirable, but it just sounds as if Banks is making it up as he goes.
But while Banks pulls that move several times on Interpol, the biggest problem here is one that their supposed patron saints were occasionally accused of: droning on.
Nearly half the tracks on Interpol, especially on tracks like “Memory Serves” and “Safe Without” repeat the exact same guitar riff with absolutely no change in intensity, rhythm or structure. What’s more, they go on about two minutes longer than necessary. In fact, almost all the songs on Interpol could have been cut down to size by at least a minute and been far more successful. “Lights,” the single released from the album, takes a full three-and-a-half minutes to incorporate every instrumental element of the band. This crescendo seems ready to burst into a turret of drums and stomping bass lines.
Then it just fades out. It’s as if the band wrote the first movement of a symphony and abandoned it.
A few songs do reproduce the sort of energy as Our Love to Admire; “Barricade” is an obvious single with standard chorus and verse structure and with a focused bridge composed of Banks’ multi-tracked vocals. But then it drops off a cliff and fades out again.
That seems to be the trend: Create a riff, repeat, incorporate drums, repeat, continue for 4 minutes, fade-out.
It’s no wonder bassist Dengler left the band after this album. This band treated these recording sessions as experimentation in the post-punk sandbox, but left without a castle to their name. Instead, all they have are a few half-finished moats.
Laziness is not minimalism. Joy Division knew that, maybe Interpol just forgot.
