Interpol: Interpol

INTERPOL: INTERPOL (2010)

1) Success; 2) Memory Serves; 3) Summer Well; 4) Lights; 5) Barricade; 6) Always Malaise; 7) Safe Without; 8) Try It On; 9) All Of The Ways; 10) The Undoing.

General verdict: In which Interpol have nothing left but tears, but they cannot even drown in them, because all the onions have gone stale.

Carlos Dengler left the band soon after the release of this self-titled disaster, and I secretly hope he took a long, long, long vacation in the Bahamas or somewhere, partying his head off, because even a cursory listen to this slow, bland, miserable wall of self-pitying makes me run for the safety of the nearest Mötley Crüe album (well, not really, but I desperately need a shot of hyper­bole for this one). Of course, in some sense, it might be argued that Banks is simply continuing the trend initiated with Our Love To Admire: Interpol continue to grow and mature, becoming ever more soulful and introspective, displaying ever more vulnerability and sensitivity, going from the tightly focused, energetic, toe-tappy rhythmics of their youth to a more relaxed, melodic, atmospheric sound and a more in-your-face confessional attitude.

But in some other sense, which has at present overwhelmed all of my remaining ones, Interpol just sucks. What was good about Our Love To Admire is that it was largely an album of anthemic sounds — Banks had willingly exchanged a bit of that post-punk enigma for wearing his heart on his sleeve, yet the best songs on that record still preserved Interpolʼs decisive energy and distributed it well enough across diverse melodies and catchy vocal hooks. On Interpol, all of that is forgotten in favor of a generally grayish, murky, monotonous mix of shoegazing and alt-rock clichés. You do not need to go further than comparing the opening tracks: ʽPioneer To The Fallsʼ had great melodic dynamics and that thick, almost commanding vocal tone ("show me the dirt pile and I will pray...") that immediately suggested there was something going on. ʽSuccessʼ, in comparison, falls back on standard shoegazing tricks and drowns the vocals in the overall sonic soup without any good hooks in sight.

From there on, almost each song atmospherically sounds like the previous one. Sometimes it feels like those heavy guitar trills are the only playing style that matters to the band now, and always it feels that Paul Banks has somehow got himself stuck in the exact same singing mode — whiny mock-tenor — and generates about as much compassion as youʼd expect from a bored hobo sitting next to you while you are forced to spend half an hour waiting for a friend. Amateur reviews of the album are full of mockery at Banksʼ attempts to sing in Spanish on the closing track, but it seems to me that much of this mockery is probably heavily fueled by all the hatred accumulated during the previous ten tracks, so when, at the very end, you are given the chance to stone the guy for «cultural appropriation», you do so with glee.

The only track on the record that has «upbeat» elements, as well as a moderately catchy chorus, is ʽBarricadeʼ, unsurprisingly released as the lead single — but it does not even match the quality of the anthemic-psychedelic ʽMammothʼ, let alone any randomly chosen decent soulful pop-rocker from anybody elseʼs catalog. Paulʼs hysterical wailing of the chorus ("it starts to feel like a barricade to keep us AWAY!... to keep us AWAY!...") will attract attention, but he is not the kind of singer who can properly transmit the feeling of uncontrolled desperation — in the end, it is more likely that the song will be deposited in the same garbage bin with 99% of mass-produced emo theatrics from the same era. The thing is, Interpol had always been gloomy and melancholic, but up to this moment, they havenʼt really been emoish-whiney; on this record, they cross the border into the territory where you are supposed to give Paul Banksʼ lyrical hero the proverbial hug, and I donʼt want to give Paul Banksʼ lyrical hero the proverbial hug. Canʼt I just smack him instead? This is not «vulnerability», this is sonic mush.

I mean, any clever person could probably predict that Interpol would not survive the transition into the 2010s, but at least both Antics and Our Love were able to garner critical acclaim, some commercial success, and a cult status among fans (for every bunch of «generic» fans of Turn On The Bright Lights, you are bound to find a smaller bunch claiming either Antics or Our Love to be the bandʼs one true masterpiece). With this self-titled «reinvention», it seems like they lost all of it: the record still continued to sell based on inertial residue, but critics and fans alike seem to have finally lost interest in defending the bandʼs relevance, given that there was no longer any. And no one should be blamed except for Paul Banks — who, for some reason, thought that the future of Interpol would rather lie in sentimental self-pitying than collective rock energy.