Interpol: Antics

INTERPOL: ANTICS (2004)

1) Next Exit; 2) Evil; 3) NARC; 4) Take You On A Cruise; 5) Slow Hands; 6) Not Even Jail; 7) Public Pervert; 8) Cʼmere; 9) Length Of Love; 10) A Time To Be So Small.

General verdict: Slightly more diverse and just a tad more challenging than its predecessor, but still mired down in self-gratifying existentialism and self-torturing formula.

There are two reasons why I think that, if we really really really want to play this game here and now, Antics is a better Interpol record than Turn On The Bright Lights. First, I might be mistaken and wouldnʼt want to repeat this statement under oath without a metronome, but I think that the songs roll in with a larger variety of tempos (essentially, this means that there are more slow tunes here, but still not as many as to ruin the experience completely). Second, some of the new songs actually have guitar riffs which — dare I even suppose it? — go beyond the typical paradigm of «hey man, just hold down this chord while the engineer goes to the bathroom» that almost literally kept nailing my head to the wall all through the duration of Bright Lights.

Thatʼs about it, though. Because even if that opening punk-pop riff in ʽNARCʼ does employ more than one chord, this does not automatically imply that it is a quality riff; again, it just sounds like a slightly simpler, deconstructed little brother of your average Television riff — and even so, it still tends to melt down into a single-chord jangle every time the chorus comes along. Actually, I find myself more partial to the monotonous, but genuinely aggressive two-chord jangle of ʽLength Of Loveʼ, where Banks finds just the right tone to go along with Dengler and Fogarinoʼs neo-disco rhythm section. That song, for what itʼs worth, is one of their most believable clones of the Joy Division sound, though no matter how low Banks goes with his vocals, he still does not reach the doom-prophet heights of Curtis.

Ironically, I do believe that Interpol were seriously dead set on making Antics surpass the effect of Bright Lights — make it a bigger, more anthemic, more sprawling experience that would cement their torch-bearing status. At the very least, this idea is very explicitly suggested by the opening track. ʽNext Exitʼ is notably slow, stately, and declares its creatorsʼ intentions right from the get-go: "We ainʼt going to the town / Weʼre going to the city / Gonna trek this shit around / And make this place a heart to be a part of". This way, you get to know that before the coming of Interpol, the City had no proper heart to speak of — but now, well, roll over Manhattan, a new brand of hipsters is taking over. The lyrics overall have a Springsteen vibe to them ("so baby make it with me in preparation for tonight..."), but, unfortunately, the song troddles along at such a funereal pace that where Bruce is able to conjure a mental image of the romantic working class protagonist zipping on his bike at light speed with his baby by his side, ʽNext Exitʼ is more of a super-slow ride on a stinky suburban train through all those grey-colored piles of rotting slums that you have to stare at for hours. Not uplifting. Not depressing. Just monotonous and dull, made even worse by the never-breaking air of glum solemnity conjured by the vocals.  

And it is still better than the three completely interchangeable songs (ʽSlow Handsʼ, ʽEvilʼ, ʽCʼmereʼ) that were released as the first three singles from the album — the best I can say about these is that they might be doing a tiny bit better job at separating verses from choruses, which is not really much to say and could, in fact, be completely wrong and misleading because I am listening to the chorus of ʽSlow Handsʼ right now and things may easily change by the time I press the «publish» button. I do like the groove power of the rhythm section — I think it takes its cue more from Blondie than from Joy Division — but then again, I could hardly picture an organic hybrid of ʽHeart Of Glassʼ with ʽShadowplayʼ in the first place, so what could be said about this particular marriage of tranquilized existential sorrow with swaggy dancefloor rhythms?

But once again, I will repeat that the albumʼs saving grace is its relative diversity. At least when only a third of your record sounds like monotonous, uninspired post-punk, while the other third tries to rock out and yet another third plays out like an homage to every second-rate shoegazing act that ever gazed at its shoes, fourty minutes of this stuff is somehow easier to sit through, and by the end of it all you might even begin to think that, you know, God did a good job sending us Interpol just so somebody could say, «hey guys! weʼre here to end it all! weʼre here to tell you that these musical formulae are done, done, done forever, and this is why try to sound so sad and clueless even if weʼre doing a pretty piss poor job of it». Of course, then you remember that at the very same time Arcade Fire were putting out Funeral and inventing a great recipe of combining sorrow with optimism — everything that a song like ʽNot Even Jailʼ does wrong, a song like ʽRebellion (Lies)ʼ does right with almost the same ingredients. But then even Arcade Fire turned out to be a dead end rather than an inspiring beginning.