Interpol
Our Love to Admire
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When Paul Banks proclaims, “It’s time we gave something new a try” a few minutes into new Interpol album Our Love to Admire, he’s ostensibly referring to sexual adventure, evidenced by the title of second track “No I in Threesome.” Still, you’ve gotta wonder how many listeners will hear those words and get overheated for another reason—the potential for different sounds, moods and emotions on the band’s third album.
Last time out, second disc Antics found the voguish New York foursome clinging conspicuously close to the precepts laid out on powerhouse debut Turn on the Bright Lights: foreboding, sunless settings atop angular melodies, ringing guitars and Banks’ detached Ian Curtis-y vocals. Thus, even though Antics was far from disastrous, it was treated as such in many quarters, since Interpol had essentially done the same thing before, only better.
Amazingly, when Our Love to Admire alters the palate slightly, it does so by moving in a direction few could have imagined possible—darker still. Sure, the disc finds Banks eschewing lyrics about creepy dudes wielding knives on snowy nights for musings about real-life relationships and romances. But when a love song begins, “Show me the dirt pile and I will pray,” it’s a safe bet wedding bells aren’t imminent.
Not that they should be. No one wants to see Daniel Kessler and Carlos D running around in Bermudas and tanks. But while the throbbing rhythms and opaque stories of “The Scale,” “The Heinrich Maneuver” and “Rest My Chemistry” are comfortably menacing, those types of songs simply don’t register the same impact the third time around. The tune that deserves to find its way onto most summer playlists is “Pace Is the Trick,” a spacious, buoyant piece of hard evidence that Interpol can and should give new colors, textures and feelings a try.