Monday, September 13, 2010

Interpol is Arrested.

If this review is accurate...

Interpol's best work sounds enormous, making any room or car in which it's played instantly feel incapable of holding it. Interpol boasts "Barricades," an awe-inspiring song full of sweeping grandeur. It has palpable weight and size. Album closer "The Undoing" gives a sense of panorama, and both "Summer Well" and "Safe Without" succeed to a lesser extent, but Interpol doesn't threaten to blow the roof off.
The size has always worked off the razor-sharp edges of the music, with Daniel Kessler's guitar leading the way. Interpol restores some of the shine, but the music still feels softer somehow, the cuts not as precise.
 ...then Interpol is all but done. The eponymous reboot is oftentimes a band's last shot at a sustained career; if you hose it, or don't immediately build on it, then you're toast. So Andrew Earles may have been right, again:

Interpol updated ’90s indie rock by brilliantly revisiting first-wave post-punk and the Church. 2003 was a heady time for the New York City foursome, when the world stayed oblivious to the fact that this was a one-and-a-half-album band. That reality slapped Capitol across the face four years later when Interpol delivered major-label debut Our Love To Admire, a small-scale Waterworld for modern rock circa now.
But if some of the songs are as enjoyable, they may yet have a new lease. Don't make us wait, boys, sling that post-punk out fast!

No comments: