Our Love To Admire – their first album for a major label – suggests that Interpol are primed and ready to complete the leap into the arena circuit, a move that Echo And The Bunnymen, for instance, never felt comfortable with. The key difference is that Interpol, as Americans, aren’t hampered by the low-key provincialism that stifled the ambitions of much British post punk. And, like the two previous albums Turn On The Bright Lights and Antics, Our Love To Admire borrows much of its nervous energy from several obvious English forebears: Echo And The Bunnymen, The Cure, Kitchens Of Distinction, Psychedelic Furs and early Banshees, as well as Joy Division and The Chameleons. Both singer Paul Banks and lead guitarist Daniel Kessler were born in Blighty and moved to the States as children John Peel was an early champion of their work, some of which was released on the British imprints Chemikal Underground and Fierce Panda while singer Paul Banks’s blank-voiced holler is often compared to that of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis and The Chameleons’ Mark “Birdy” Burgess. Unlike most of these likeminded revivalists, Interpol found many post-punk legends dutifully reciprocating their affections: Robert Smith, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook have all cited them approvingly, REM have covered one of their songs (the beautifully bleak “NYC”, from Interpol’s first album), and a recent low-key London gig attracted dozens of premier league guitar bands, all joining Coldplay, Gwyneth Paltrow and the Primrose Hill mob.īritain’s enthusiastic embrace of Interpol has much to do with the band’s perceived Anglophilia. The New York quartet, now in their tenth year and on their third album proper, were at the forefront of this New Wave of New Wave, sneaking in before other pale, literate, wasp-waisted young men like Franz Ferdinand, Editors, The Departure, Bloc Party and Hot Hot Heat, could get on board. Now Interpol’s doom-laden vocals, choppy guitar riffs and wiry, hypnotic basslines find themselves providing the soundtrack to the ongoing post-punk revival, as a whole generation of teenagers and twentysomethings continue to party like it’s 1979. They recall a time when miserable young men from the north of England were staring into the mid-distance, and wearing long trenchcoats.
Geeky yet sinister, imperious to the point of self-parody, their skinny ties, armbands and Hitler Youth haircuts seem stuck in a peculiar vintage of rock history. Interpol, to lapsed punks of a certain age, must look like a Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of a post-punk band.
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