Interpol: Our Love to Admire review

Interpol: Our Love to Admire

‘Baby, you tried, but here come the falls.’

Our Love to Admire is a troubled album. Apart from the lowering of the reverb knob and increased presence of piano/keyboards, there is not much different about it from the previous two, but something is off. I don’t think it’s Interpol-by-numbers as many have suggested, but rather characteristic of an inner tension or a loss of footing. Things start off strong as an icy guitar part introduces “Pioneer to the Falls” and the song is indeed one of their best, cold and brutal. It quite sets the tone, because Our Love to Admire is a dark and mean album. Every song seems to be about cutting someone out like a cancer, and the pace rarely revs up past a dirge except to get furious (as with “Mammoth” – ‘I won’t let you sit by so cold in the pitch night, it’s enough with this fucking incense’). “Pace Is the Trick” as they say, as Paul Banks characterizes a woman as a lioness, talking about lack of self-control and insatiable nature, and at the bottom of it all, destruction and corruption.

The band has taken the sound context of Turn on the Bright Lights but replaced the exhausted introspection with a fiery look outward. Perhaps in doing so it does not quite devastate the way that album did (and I maintain it is one of the finest debuts of the past decade or more), it is still an emotional limpet-mine of an album that tears you apart when you’re not expecting it.

84% => ****

—as of this writing, this is #11 on my best of 2007 list—

~ by jshopa on April 23, 2008.