El Pintor

When Interpol went out on their first tour behind their 2002 album Turn on the Bright Lights, Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard imparted some prophetic advice for drummer Sam Fogarino at an Ohio stop: “Don’t sell more than 50,000 records or you’re in trouble.” Nine years later, the album was certified Gold by the RIAA—that’s 500,000 units sold in the U.S.—and trouble has, indeed, followed the band since their star-making debut. Look past the questionable lyrics and behind-the-scenes debauchery, and it becomes clear that Interpol have been victims of unreasonable expectations. As with many pop cultural events that have taken place in the last 13 years, 9/11 plays a role, as Turn on the Bright Lights’ dark, impeccably styled catharsis took on an accidental resonance, despite being written before that cataclysmic day. With its iridescent glow and empathetic hook (“New York cares”), album centerpiece “NYC” carried a specific weight; around 9/11's tenth anniversary, Suede’s Brett Anderson professed a love for the song, and Michael Stipe covered it with R.E.M. in 2003, all of which suggested that Interpol should be considered a Serious Band.

The 12 years following Turn on the Bright Lights’ release, however, have only proven that looking to Interpol for profundity makes as much sense as installing a diving board in a kiddie pool. If we’re being real, the band’s ankle-deep tendencies started with Bright Lights, and that’s not necessarily an insult: like many bands surfing the new-rock wave at the time, Interpol turned shallowness into a kind of goofy virtue, the sonic equivalent of wearing sunglasses indoors. There was, and still is, nothing inherently original about what they were doing—Peter Hook cheekily applied to be the band’s bassist in 2010, only to be rejected—but in a musical climate jam-packed with call-backs to rock’s past, Interpol were, in their own way, innovators. They took the sonic template for one of the most serious bands of all time and applied it to tales of white lines, late nights, and hetero-male woes that made “Entourage” look like The Joy Luck Club. In 2014, this is called “trolling”; in 2002, it simply sounded like a good time.

The years passed, and it became clear that Interpol’s talents could be listed on one hand, which was, again, not initially a bad thing. Antics from 2004 lacked the enveloping, cohesive atmosphere that made Turn on the Bright Lights such a striking debut, but the songs were definitely there. In 2007, Interpol did away away with the pesky, ill-fitting notions of “indie” (which the band only represented in sound, similar to how the term is still occasionally bandied about in the UK music press) by sensibly, and briefly, making the major-label leap to Capitol; the resulting record from that partnership, Our Love to Admire, is typically pinpointed as the moment Interpol started their steep, steady decline.

The chilly reception Our Love to Admire received at the time now seems a little unfair, and possibly the result of cultural fatigue; 2007, after all, was certainly not 2002, and Interpol’s stubborn refusal to show any progress after five years of visibility was a sign to many that the band’s slavish unoriginality was growing stale. In reality, Our Love to Admire represents Interpol at their most Interpol-iest—streamlined songwriting, crystal-clear production, lyrics directly referencing cocaine, a song called “No I in Threesome”—and if it’s not their best album, it’s certainly a hell of a lot better than what followed. The swaggering melodrama and shiny-suit dark pop of Our Love to Admire was, more so than ever for Interpol, redolent of bands from the ‘80s; this time, though, they approached the modern-day equivalent of Duran Duran’s empty-headed brilliance, a fitting full-circle since Carlos Dengler was known to wear a Duran Duran T-shirt during rehearsals for Bright Lights.

Regardless, Our Love to Admire was not a commercial leap, and so Interpol entered a new decade with a return to their old bosses at Matador and their fourth, self-titled album. Easily the band’s worst record to date, Interpol was bereft of hooks, choruses, and other elements that make listening to music enjoyable. Four years later, they've all but disowned the record, judging by their set lists. So it’s understandable to approach the band’s fifth album in 12 years, El Pintor, with suspicion. The album’s title means “the painter” in Spanish, but it’s also an anagram for the band’s name, and the similarities to its predecessor don’t end there: as with Interpol, this new one’s 10 songs long, self-produced, with studio vet Alan Moulder handling mixing duties. The phrase “approach with caution” comes to mind.

El Pintor isn’t “more of the same” in one specific way: it’s Interpol’s first album without Dengler on bass, following his departure in 2010; although Dave Pajo served as his replacement on the tour promoting Interpol, the band’s a trio now, with frontman Paul Banks taking on four-string duties. Dengler’s absence is felt not least by the people in the band; Fogarino recently admitted to NME that Dengler’s talents were “a huge part of [Interpol’s] sound...You couldn’t take that away.” But El Pintor sounds like the work of a band revitalized, for the moment at least. There’s considerable energy in these songs, with just enough melodic smarts for El Pintor to rank as the fourth-best Interpol album—a dubious achievement, sure, but the failure of Interpol makes even that surprising.

There’s nothing here that touches the band’s creative peak, but any of El Pintor’s songs could hang with Interpol’s strongest deep cuts. With a red-herring of an opening that resembles the stately Antics opener “Next Exit”, “All the Rage Back Home” is the strongest up-tempo Interpol single since Our Love to Admire’s “The Heinrich Maneuver”, propelled by Fogarino’s jet-engine drumming and a chorus delivered by Banks, in his distinctive whine, that sounds as wistful as it does festival-ready. The tricky licks of “My Desire” fondly recall Our Love to Admire’s “All Fired Up”, while album highlight “Anywhere” cannily fuses the patient urgency of Bright Lights’ “Obstacle 1” and the proclamatory riffs of Antics’ “C’mere”.

If you’re starting to notice a trend here, then the ultimate failing of El Pintor is apparent: this is the sound of a band feeding on its past, a move that counters the bloodlessness of Interpol with a formula that is as moderately effective as it is uninspired. The slow, elegant majesty of “My Blue Supreme” is a re-trod of Our Love to Admire’s chiming “Rest My Chemistry”, the insistent throb of “Ancient Ways” essentially resembles Antics’ “Not Even Jail” rejiggered slightly, and so on.

The sole surprising moment arrives two-thirds of the way into “Ancient Ways”, when Banks breaks into a brief falsetto that shatters even Randy Jackson’s definition of “pitchy”; it’s quite possibly the most embarrassing thing Banks has ever done on record, and we’re talking about a guy who once sang the lyric “You’re so young/ Like a daisy in my lazy eye” with serious conviction. Lyrically, Banks has long been a punching bag, but his middle-school-poetry approach has grown endearing over time—and it’s also all but vanished from this decade of the band’s work. The most memorable lyric Interpol provided was when, in a bit of unintentional hilarity, Banks moaned “I’m a nice guy” on album opener “Success”; here, it’s on “My Blue Supreme”, in the form of the telling pre-chorus utterance “Only one in a hundred make it/ We fake until there’s nothing to fake.”

These lines could be interpreted a few ways—a commentary on the stylishness that Interpol once so exuded, a self-castigation of the band’s own derivative tendencies—but it could also be seen as a statement of survival. Circa Antics, the major-label-subsidiary market was flooded with Interpol soundalikes that ranged from not-bad to not-terrible to flat-out-awful; they sounded like copies of copies, and by the time the major-label system sunk their claws into the real thing, the whole thing resembled an endless series of funhouse mirrors. With El Pintor, Interpol don’t sound as much like Interpol as they do a band that really wants to be Interpol; it’s a sad notion for anyone who once held this band’s music dear to their hearts, but taking into account what came before, it’s a miracle that Interpol still exist in this capacity at all.