Show of strength
Two decades of doom and uplift reach a point of assured power on NYC trio’s seventh.
Interpol ★★★★ The Other Side Of Make-Believe MATADOR. CD/DL/LP
EN ROUTE to becoming an enormous cult band – with the kind of devoted following who treat their songs as soul-mining poetry and ink their skins with their lyrics and artwork – Interpol, to many casual listeners, have seemed to paint in very similar shades of noir-ish rock. Their colours seem to range from dark to even darker, though years of dogged touring, along with the contrasting emotional uplift of their music, has found them occupying a position similar to the oft-missing-in-action Cure.
The last we heard of the New York trio, in 2017, they were celebrating the 15th anniversary of their Turn On The Bright Lights debut and following it up, in 2018, with Marauder, an album recorded with Flaming Lips/Mogwai producer Dave Fridmann onto tape, to preserve its rawness and live-played ambience. This successor is different in mood and character: closer and warmer.
With songs written separately (singer Paul Banks being pandemic-grounded in Edinburgh for nine months), then wood-shedded in a rented house in the Catskills and recorded in London, it is sonically shaped by Flood and Alan Moulder, specialists through their work with Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode in producing shadowy music with arena-sized dimensions. If the record marks a shift in Interpol’s working methods from jamming out ideas together in a rehearsal space, the result is greater attention to detail and a deepening of each of the three’s musical characters.
Built around Daniel Kessler’s increasingly spidery, web-weaving guitar lines, Sam Fogarino’s twisting and turning art-rock beats (with their circular figures and surprising accents) and topped here and there with deceptively simple, repetitive piano lines, the tracks have a hypnotic effect. Banks’s vocals, meanwhile, are more intimate than ever, crooning directly into the listener’s ears. The early-years influence of Ian Curtis on Banks’s singing style has meanwhile given way to something closer to the tortured passion of Ian McCulloch. In places, the band follow suit – Gran Hotel comes over like a worldweary take on the Bunnymen’s The Cutter.
Lyrically, Banks is typically allusive. In the past, he’s elliptically detailed his troubles with alcohol and substances, particularly after getting clean in 2006. But still the struggles appear to be never far away. “I need someone to grasp at,” he confesses in Passenger, “when I fall into a hole with a mountain on my back.” Even at his doomiest, however, whether personally or in terms of bleak worldview, there’s hope at the heart of these songs. “It’s time we made something stable,” he urges amid the snaking instrumental parts of Fables.
Depending on your perspective, Interpol may well remain either strangely samey or capable of sustaining a powerful mood. Ultimately, though, there’s something quietly masterful about The Other Side Of Make-Believe. Strong, dignified, scarred but moving forwards, it’s the sound of a band charting emotional disturbances, but emerging renewed.