Off the Shoulders Of Giants

Interpol’s third album, “Our Love To Admire” (Capitol), its first for a major label, goes on sale today and looks ripe for commercial success. The consistency of the band’s songs, with their soaring guitars, esoteric lyrics, and brooding atmospheres, have made this band a model of resilience among those New York acts to emerge around the turn of the millennium. Here we find the distinctive sound polished to a pop glimmer, with more hooks than ever before.But if Interpol, which rehabilitated the New York music scene along with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Strokes in 2001, is determined to do anything else (aside from make a ton of money), it’s to demonstrate, through stubbornness, that its sound is more than the sum of its influences. “Our Love To Admire” reconciles this goal with the band’s willingness to transform the sinister tune into a lively and stylish musical take.Front-heavy with rhythmic catchiness, the album’s first song, “Pioneer to the Falls,” builds gothic grandeur with layers of Daniel Kessler’s guitar harmonies and, in an unusual move for the band, even Renaissance-like flute lilt and trumpets. After a bridge of staccato snare drum, lead singer Paul Banks finishes the song by crooning, “Show me the dirt pile / And I will pray that the soul can take / Three stowaways / In a passion it broke / I pull the black from the gray / But the soul can wait / I felt you so much today.” He holds the balance between obtuseness and drama, drawing on the same aesthetic tendency that led the band to fill the album’s jacket design with artful photographs of wild animals in natural history dioramas.The second song, and the best candidate for an EP remix, “No I in Threesome,” sounds like a cautionary tale, presumably inspired by the unintended results of rockstar-level partying. At just under four minutes, the song opens with a driving, almost empty repeated lick before dipping into a deeply satisfying and dreamy guitar breakdown on the lyric “two lovers divide.” When the tune returns to faster beats, though, we discover that it’s a not a warning against sexual adventurousness, but a consideration of it as a fix for a tired relationship, or one that just needs “something new.” When Mr. Banks sings “There’s no ‘I’ in threesome, and I am all for it,” one understands how the song’s title proposes an argument for a ménage à trios, whether for a relationship that needs an existential slap in the face or a lover desperate for the rejuvenating powers of his own jealousy.The gothic tone of the album’s first half crescendos with “Scale,” which puts a repetitious guitar melody through drone distortion to apt lyrics about a “molten sky.” Mr. Banks’s delivery remains monotonously machine-like and somehow emotive at the same time. The professionalism of this famously dapper band shows in the leanness of the songs, the ability to mold even its less interesting ideas into listenable material. Such is the case with “Pace Is the Trick,” which is much more a case of song as branding than anything that appeared on Interpol’s enchanting 2001 debut, “Turn on the Bright Lights.” On the other hand, tracks such as “Mammoth” and “Heinrich Maneuver” do more with fast and energetic rhythms, relying less on moodiness and production and more on capable songwriting.The final track, the pensive “The Lighthouse,” is one of the album’s more compelling songs, if only because it creates a contrast to the tightness of the 10 tracks that precede it. Though Interpol made its name in part on taut sounds and clean productions, it truly got its start exploring less assured paths to musical beauty. If longtime fans of the band find that the studio glimmer of “Our Love To Admire” leaves a bad taste, they can rest assured that the group’s members have done nothing if not earned our trust: They know just what they’re doing.

Off the Shoulders Of Giants

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