Interpol, Our Love to Admire

I must declare promptly my love for the first track and the last track on Interpol’s latest, Our Love to Admire. “Pioneer to the Falls” and “The Lighthouse” are massively beautiful gorgeous hymns, some of the best work this group has penned and performed. “The Lighthouse” particularly is sparse and atmospheric, recalling one of my favorite cuts, Radiohead’s “Like Spinning Plates” as well as “Song to the Siren” by This Mortal Coil. You can easily picture in your mind standing on a rocky shoreline at midnight, gazing out into the oily black sea and glancing as the stoic beaming lighthouse. I am not sure if the lyrics are anything about that since I usually don’t pay much attention to Paul Banks’s odd poetry, if I even can comprehend what he’s singing about, and the lyric book, true to Interpol’s spartan mod nature, contains no lyrics. My other choice cut is the first single, “The Heinrich Maneuver,” which is bouncy and jangly but the other tracks tend to warrant many listens before sticking into your memory. I came up with an analogy for this observation. When I graduated from high school, family friends gave me a set of brass bookends with my initial engraved onto them. In my dorm room in college, I used them to contain my textbooks which were mostly for unappealing subjects and classes (I disliked most of my classes). That is just like Our Love to Admire. The bookends are the opener and closer, and the dull textbooks are the tracks in the middle. There might be an occasional non-dud like the aforementioned “The Heinrich Maneuver” as well as “No I in Threesome” and “Pace is the Trick.” Some reviews have lamented the absence of Sam Fogarino’s militant drumming and Carlos D’s dope bass lines. As a consolation prize, new instruments join the fray, such as piano and double bass. Not quite the same. I want my jerky dance-y tunes like from Turn on the Bright Lights! I’ll keep listening though and be quiet.