alive & indie

Death Cab for Cutie - Narrow Stairs

2008-07-20T10:10:00.002+01:00

Death Cab for Cutie - Narrow Stairs
(Atlantic; 2008)

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Review:

Love isn't watching someone die, contrary to what Ben Gibbard memorably sang on Death Cab for Cutie's major-label debut. No, love is watching someone grow and change and still staying with them-- whether we're talking about family, friends, romantic interests, or a little college-town indie rock band from about an hour-and-a-half outside Seattle. Death is just the dénouement. In the three years since their platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated Plans, Gibbard and Death Cab producer/guitarist Chris Walla have both entered their thirties, coming off a wave of successes that included 2003's Transatlanticism going gold and the debut by Gibbard side project the Postal Service becoming Sub Pop's best-selling disc since Nirvana. That's a whole lotta love.

Narrow Stairs, Death Cab's second album for Atlantic and sixth proper LP overall, is one of the darkest and most muscular in the band's discography, but they're still aiming for the same place: your heart. It's an album about growing and changing and becoming resigned to the fact that you'll never be truly content-- not even if you quit that day job, achieve your rock'n'roll dreams, and find yourself in a loving marriage. At times, the maturation feels forced; the more adventurous moments here are experimental only for such a high-profile group, and they don't play to Gibbard's sentimental, word-weighing strengths. Still, even the disappointingly sleepy Plans had ear-catching singles, and when Death Cab go with their pop instincts on Narrow Stairs, they bang out songs focused and evocative enough to win over maybe a few of this loved-and-hated group's longtime skeptics.

There are some vast expanses to navigate first, both production-wise and lyrically. Where Transatlanticism spanned an ocean, and Plans opened astride "the East River and Hudson," Narrow Stairs starts along the California coast, where Gibbard retreated to write the album. "I descended a dusty gravel ridge," his bookish tenor begins, in clear but vivid language, on "Bixby Canyon Bridge". Gibbard has said the song is about trying to commune with Jack Kerouac, who stayed in the same cabin to write Big Sur. From an initial echoey guitar trill, the track grows to pounding, distorted bombast somewhere between OK Computer and the new Coldplay single.

Speaking of singles, Narrow Stairs' first is the eight-and-a-half minute "I Will Possess Your Heart", a decision that's likely to be more successful as brand repositioning than it is as rock music. Death Cab get uncompromising-artist points for the four-minute intro that builds up with vamping bass, sprinkles of keyboard, and atmospheric guitar, but it's hardly essential to the standard-length pop song that follows, about how a well-intentioned man can turn into a de facto creepy stalker. "You gotta spend some time, love," Gibbard sings, as if by explanation for the song's length.

On Narrow Stairs, Death Cab move from the undergraduate longing of their earlier work and the looming mortality of Plans to a more generalized existential angst. But they're most successful when they don't switch up their style to match; the sound of settling, as Transatlanticism maintained, is a peppy "ba ba," not the krautrock pulse of this album's synth-touched remainder metaphor, "Long Division". Elsewhere, the tabla on "Pity and Fear" sounds out of place, not far-out; as Indian-instrumented songs about an apparent adulterous one-night stand go, this one's no "Norwegian Wood".

"No Sunlight" cuts through the murk like a beam of, well, sunlight-- musically, at least. Bright keyboards and guitars sweeten Gibbard's pessimistic lyrics, which contrast childhood bliss with the emptiness of adulthood. The best song on the album, "Cath...", matches the knotty, Built to Spill-style riffs of Death Cab's early records with a plainspoken (and gut-wrenching) account of a bride who dooms herself to misery by marrying the wrong man. Where fools rush in, Gibbard refuses to rush to judgment: "I'd have done the same as you," he concludes.

What Death Cab have to fear most is not their urge to dabble in different genres, but the risk of sounding like a more cloying version of their younger selves. On "You Can Do Better Than Me", which waltzes its 1960s-pop organs way past the line that Ben Folds' "The Luckiest" toed like a ballerina, Gibbard's nice-guy earnestness becomes too much even for a listener who relates to nice-guy earnestness. It's easy to tell where the heavy-handed "Your New Twin Sized Bed" and "The Ice Is Getting Thinner" are headed as soon as you hear their first lines, and thin ice is a pretty thin cliché for such a lyric-focused group. "Grapevine Fires" does better, adding funereal harmonies and recalling debut LP Something About Airplanes with a line about "wine and some paper cups."

Surely Death Cab's awkward position as one of the few indie rock groups with a platinum record would be enough to drive anyone to drink. Fellow million-sellers Modest Mouse brought on Johnny Marr for their latest major-label LP; the Decemberists, who also signed to a major but didn't go platinum, have yet to release their follow-up. Narrow Stairs' musical growing pains make sense for an album that stares into the banal void of contemporary adulthood. If you love the band, you'll probably find enough reasons here to keep sticking with them.

Weezer - Weezer (The Red Album)

2008-07-20T10:01:00.001+01:00

Weezer - Weezer (The Red Album)
(DGC/Interscope; 2008)

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Review:

Although weaned on prog-metal, educated in classical music at Harvard, and once viewed as a representative of the indie rock set, Weezer's Rivers Cuomo prefers to write simple music that can be easily enjoyed by a mass audience. It was one of many elements that defined him in the beginning, on his band's hugely popular 1994 self-titled debut (The Blue Album), if one of few remaining characteristics defining his music today.

Following poor initial sales of the record's follow-up, the more introspective cult hit Pinkerton, Cuomo famously retreated from the public eye. Over the next five years, the band would remain silent, cultivating goodwill and an ever-growing army of fans. But most of that goodwill has deteriorated since their re-emergence in 2001, in the wake of three mediocre-to-awful albums that were, in many ways, the opposite of what made Cuomo's band so adored in the first place.

Sadly, the once burned-out Weezer continue to fade away: Those first two records capture their decade in 75 minutes of near-perfect power-pop: straight-faced irony, eccentric sincerity, meta references, and bipolar guitar distortion from ordinary-looking outcasts who became stars and then complained about it. Punk that's too catchy to offend. Pop that's too smart to cop to itself. And, uh, emo. After Pinkerton, the deluge; rap-metal and post-grunge wound up so thoroughly conquering modern rock that now even staunch rockists are making excited noises about "American Idol" winner David Cook. Hey, somebody's supposed to save mainstream rock'n'roll, right?

Not these guys. Beginning with 2001's so-so Green Album and plumbing Jules Verne depths with 2005's terrible Make Believe, the band began to take on some of the most infuriating characteristics of the very bands that had replaced them during their absence: intelligence-insulting songwriting, cookie-cutter dynamics, questionable facial hair. At the very least, The Red Album (as Weezer have nicknamed their latest) is a first step toward rehabilitation-- a tacit admission that recent discs, with their empty universality and recycled riffs, had a problem. But it's not a return to glory unless you consider 2001 their glory days.

Judging by appetizing first single "Pork and Beans", The Red Album could've been almost as funny and catchy as Pinkerton's "El Scorcho", only from the perspective of a married man coming up on 40. It's as if last year's demos compilation, Alone, helped Cuomo remember how to do this stuff right. His sarcastic mention of super-producer Timbaland's chart magic is as hilarious as it is on-point-- especially after Madonna's dreadful, Tim-helmed #1 single, "4 Minutes". Jacknife Lee (who co-produced the album along with Make Believe overseer Rick Rubin) lets the chorus explode from the mix in a way that little on the radio does anymore. It demands to be sung by millions of uncomprehending bar-goers.

With an opening Rogaine reference, "Pork and Beans" also establishes The Red Album's main theme. Already a self-described "old man" on Pinkerton, Cuomo is focused these days on reliving his lost youth-- probably the same reason some of us still listen to Weezer albums. Lead track and third single "Troublemaker" starts back in school, a faint whiff of existential angst and a surging bridge helping to redeem a vapid chorus and monotonous, familiar-sounding guitars. The laughably bad "Heart Songs" is The Blue Album's nostalgic "In the Garage" schmaltzed up as a sort of name-dropping "Circle of Life"; if Nirvana had "the chords that broke the chains I had upon me," kudos to Cuomo for swiping them on the otherwise forgettable teenage prankfest "Everybody Get Dangerous" (to quote: "boo-yahhh").

At this point, Weezer is as much a brand as a band. When Cuomo relinquishes the mic, The Red Album could be by any group of modern-rock mediocrities. Longtime guitarist Brian Bell gets throaty and twangy like a poor man's Rob Thomas on repetitive non-apology "Thought I Knew", backed by bland acoustic guitar and a TR-808 drum machine. Bassist Scott Shriner speak-sings in creepy stalker mode on "Cold Dark World", with Cuomo swooping to the rescue on the choruses. "Automatic", led by original drummer Pat Wilson, returns to the faceless crunching of 2002's Maladroit.

Not that Cuomo needs other voices to reveal that The Red Album is hardly the work of idiosyncratic auteurship the first couple of singles could've suggested. He sings on peppy, tempo-switching "Dreamin'" and the grandiose finale, "The Angel and the One", but for all their background-friendly polish, both are typical, vacuous latter-day Weezer tracks.

The Red Album's most ambitious song adapts the Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts". The melody, played first on piano recalling Pinkerton's "Across the Sea", is more obvious than the Erik Satie snippet Cuomo ganked for The Blue Album's "Surf Wax America", but now, as then, the theft isn't the point. "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)" is the warped genius let loose, from half-rapped intro to Queen bombast to baroque a cappella. Like the YouTube culture the "Pork and Beans" video depicts so well, the song-- and this album-- relies on a high quantity of short-lived pretty good ideas to distract from a shortage of great ones.

M83 - Saturdays=Youth

2008-07-20T09:49:00.002+01:00

M83 - Saturdays=Youth
(Mute; 2008)

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Review:

Saturdays=Youth-- the new album from French musician M83 (aka Anthony Gonzalez)-- opens with a stately piano phrase. Synths gradually overtake the piano and Gonzalez sings concise lyrics in falsetto-- "It's your face/ Where are we?/ Save me"-- amid billowing harmonies. It's the sort of big, beatless slow-burn he often uses to dramatize an impending pivot, a moment when the percussion gallops in and the song takes off for the stratosphere. But on this track, "You, Appearing", that pivot never arrives. Instead, the music tapers off into the booming overture of "Kim & Jessie".

Saturdays=Youth is still huge music, with three players in addition to Gonzalez-- but it has a different kind of heft from previous M83 records. On Before the Dawn Heals Us, M83 was all about the vertical push-- layer after layer of synths and drums piled up in a vertiginous tower. But these new songs disperse in all directions: Producers Ewan Pearson and Ken Thomas spread the melodies and beats into a sound world of uncommon vibrancy and pristine clarity, mounted on a massive yet now more proportionate scale.

Not only does the music move differently, it offers a different take on M83's favorite decade, the 1980s. Where previous albums saluted the doomed grandeur of the Cure and the retro-futurism of Blade Runner, Saturdays=Youth pays homage to Cocteau Twins (whom Thomas has also produced) and the teen dramas of filmmaker John Hughes. It's dense with new wave tropes: the chrome-plated guitars and aqueous keyboards on "Kim & Jessie", the decadent synthetic toms on the otherwise cloudy "Skin of the Night", the funk guitars and shivering cymbals of the masterful "Couleurs". Many modern bands have appropriated these iconic touchstones with a wink, a revision, or both. M83's reverent take is less common, bringing to mind Lansing-Dreiden's underappreciated 80s throwback The Dividing Island.

The album has the same nostalgic sparkle as Hughes' films, a soft-focused mythology of eternal summers and young love. In the liner notes, Gonzalez dedicates it to "all the friends, music, movies, joints, and crazy teachers that made my teenage years so great!" At 26, Gonzalez is just the right age to look back on this era with rose-tinted glasses, forgetting the alienation and anxiety, remembering only the sweetness. Whenever the darker side of teenhood rears its head, it's heroically battled back: On the shoegaze-thick "Dark Moves of Love", "everything is wrecked and grey," but the song ends on a poignant note: "I will fight the time and bring you back!" On the album's cover, heartbreakingly radiant youths (one of them a dead ringer for Molly Ringwald) strike poses in a gold and russet pasture-- the same kind of beautiful misfits that Hughes arranged in after-school detention. In lyrics filled with lusty eruptions ("They are Gods! They are lightning!"), archetypal teens invent themselves with innocent fervor: A love-struck young couple in "Kim & Jessie"; a goth with a crown of black roses and a heart of bubblegum in "Graveyard Girl".

In the context of teen drama, how perfect is it that Gonzalez met Morgan Kibby, whose dovelike vocals enrich "Skin of the Night" and "Up!", on MySpace? In the context of a band whose music is both literally and metaphorically cinematic, how perfect is it that Kibby has done voiceover work on the trailers for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water? These symmetries make Saturdays=Youth feel like an unaccountably alive, complete album. While some fans might be disappointed by the lack of a "Don't Save Us From the Flames"-style anthem, the change in M83's sound arrives just as Gonzalez has pushed the maximal thing to its limits and risks diminishing returns. On its first two studio albums, M83 did one thing very, very well: create compact doses of tension and adrenaline. Saturdays=Youth meaningfully diversifies M83's catalog while retaining Gonzalez's indelible fingerprint. Like his recent ambient foray, Digital Shades Vol. 1, it finds a guy who's known for painting gigantic horizons figuring out how to broaden them even more.

Portishead - Third

2008-07-19T12:04:00.002+01:00

Portishead - Third
(Island; 2008)

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Review:

Can an album really be a departure if it's the first thing a group's released in 11 years? It ideally would be for a genre-bound band turned brand name like Portishead: As much as there is to miss about the mid-late 1990s, the time for any trip-hop revival is far into the future, and picking up right where they left off in 1997 would make Portishead some kind of sad cipher coasting on the fumes of an exhausted trend-- something they've always been above. If the voice of Beth Gibbons wasn't so ingrained in the consciousness of a whole generation of indie kids, you could look at Third as a sort of re-debut; it posits that the sound of Portishead can actually exist even after the group excises every possible remnant of trip-hop from it.

As radical reinventions go, Third is surprisingly natural. You can credit Gibbons as the familiarizing factor: She possesses a voice that seems impossible to shackle to just one musical setting, even if it already sounds perfectly at home in brooding downtempo ambience. As the most recognizable component of the group, she has the most established stylistic tendencies-- subtle quivers, an ability to go from hushed to piercing without laboring over the transition, an aching timbre that expresses anxious vulnerability better than nearly any other singer-- and she slips back into them comfortably when she needs to.

But it's also a style that works in more contexts than we've previously heard, something she hinted at with Rustin Man on 2002's folk and jazz-influenced Out of Season, and Third is the culmination of this. Pitted against the jarring mechanical stop-starts of first single "Machine Gun" or the chase-scene-paced opener "Silence", Gibbons sounds like both a defiant accuser and someone clinging on for dear life. Quieter numbers, like the slow-build electronic ballad "The Rip" or the softer moments of the cabaret highwire act "Hunter", highlight the fragility in her voice. And since almost every song on Third addresses some sort of emotional or mental helplessness-- typically a deep and profound sense of loss and isolation-- it's almost as though this shift in sonic identity is there to mask the fact that this is an incredibly bleak record lyrically. Gibbons' wounded tone can take commonplace-on-paper sentiments ("I'd like to laugh at what you said but I just can't find a smile"; "I can't deny what I've become/ I'm just emotionally undone") and give them a kind of pathos that's almost uncomfortably voyeuristic to listen to.

As for how the music itself has changed, long story short: Third is a psychedelic rock album. It opens with a rhythm that's nearly twice as fast as almost everything else Portishead have done, the percussion on most of the songs is frequently muffled or buried under layers of noise and sometimes just stops short of being non-existent (though it's heavy and propulsive when it does make itself known), and their keyboards and strings have graduated from relaxed tension into dissonant rumbles and shrieks. There's a brief acoustic folk song ("Deep Water"), an abrasive and jittery electro-industrial number ("Machine Gun"), free jazz horns ("Magic Doors"), analog freakouts from the United States of America-fueled early days of electronic psych ("The Rip"), and a song that sounds a bit like Clinic's droning, rhythmically dense garage-kraut, except somehow spookier ("We Carry On"). Portishead as you previously knew them are represented, barely, by the last song on the album-- the sleepwalk-paced, David Axelrod-esque "Threads"-- and even then, its intermittently fuzzed-out tension-and-release dynamic would've made it one of the harshest-sounding songs on Dummy or Portishead.

You could say that this would be unrecognizable as a Portishead album without Gibbons' voice, and you'd be sort of right; guitarist and contributing songwriter Adrian Utley mentioned in a recent New York Times article that one of the rules they set for Third was that they couldn't fall back on any instruments-- or even any trademark sounds-- that they'd used on previous albums. But their style here isn't particularly out of character, comparatively experimental as it is; Utley's guitar still twangs sharply when it's not doing things like interjecting "Iron Man" growls in "Hunter" or splintering into Syd Barrett-isms at the coda of "Small", and the melodic identity that he and Geoff Barrow built on a foundation of minor keys and sinister grandeur still holds sway. In the terms of a group that was frequently lumped in with film composers as much as Bristol axis peers, Portishead's Euro-cool John Barry intrigue has been pushed into the disquieting territory of John Carpenter's compositions and Bernard Herrmann's Alfred Hitchcock scores.

Keep in mind just how out-of-nowhere this all seems: The notion of a new Portishead album had, for many fans, fallen out of the realm of possibility. If Third had come out in 1999 or 2000, maybe writers would be calling it Portishead's answer to Massive Attack's Mezzanine, another third album by trip-hop icons eschewing dinner-conversation music by embracing anxiety and moodiness. Released today, it instead feels like a staggering transformation and a return to form that was never lost, an ideal adaptation by a group that many people didn't know they needed to hear again.

The National - The Virginia EP

2008-07-19T12:00:00.000+01:00

The National - The Virginia EP
(Beggars Banquet; 2008)

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Review:

The National's Boxer deservedly landed the group on year-end lists and magazine covers, helping the band spend the past several months selling out progressively bigger venues and gaining increasingly positive word-of-mouth support. But beyond all the plaudits and praise, you can most easily tell the National have made it to the top because there are so many people complaining they don't belong there. Alas, these days backlash is the true mark of the winner.

Still, not every victory deserves a victory lap. A slot touring with R.E.M. and Modest Mouse was healthy reward enough; in comparison, The Virginia EP, and in particular its companion film A Skin, A Night, feel unnecessary. One problem is that little on The Virginia is actually new or even unreleased. Rather, the EP works as a sort of souvenir, a reminder of the band's many highs over the course of the past several months, even if little on the disc actually comes close to matching those highs. Certainly it's less dull and disorienting than Vincent Moon's erstwhile doc A Skin, A Night, which comes off a belated electronic press kit. Were the band (or more likely its label) aware of the impact Boxer would later make, A Skin, A Night is the kind of thing that would have been sent out to drum up interest in a potential breakthrough act. Coming now, it's more than a little redundant and often boring. We know how the story ends, and the rudimentary sketches of Boxer's beginning don't exactly broaden its scope.

The three songs that kick off The Virginia EP would have made a pretty fine single themselves, with "You've Done It Again, Virginia", the stately (and Sufjan Stevens-adorned) selling point, bolstered by the tougher "Santa Clara" and the brooding "Blank Slate". "Mansion on the Hill" is an odd cover choice to draw from Bruce Springsteen's tailor-made-for-the-National Nebraska; at least the group does a nice job rearranging the song to suit its strengths. Of the demos included, "Tall Saint" seems closest to fruition. "Forever After Days" and "Rest of Years" less so, though comparing the demo of "Slow Show" to what ended up on Boxer, one suspects both those works in progress could have eventually made the cut. What's left are an unremarkable Charlotte Martin cover, "Without Permission", and a handful of live tracks and radio sessions: "Lucky You" is a welcome reminder to newcomers that there was a National even before Alligator, while versions of "Fake Empire" and "About Today" adequately capture the mix of poignancy and pathos that make the National so thrilling live.

But that's just what's missing here: the thrills. In fact, there's something even anti-climatic about The Virginia EP. Coming from a band powerful enough to change lives on the stereo or make you feel more alive while on stage, it seems oddly perfunctory. Not slapped together per se, but lacking the cohesive strength of Boxer proper. That's to be expected. That's what B-sides are typically for, after all-- material that for one reason or another is not quite A-level-- and indeed much of The Virginia previously made its way to various singles and other outlets. Yet taken together, these demos and live tracks don't add up to much more than a reminder that the finished product was much better than the sketches, and that the live tracks are no substitute for catching the band in person.

Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends

2008-07-19T11:46:00.001+01:00

Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends
(Capitol; 2008)

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Review:

Earlier this year, Britons voted Coldplay as The Band Most Likely to Put You to Sleep. The poll, conducted by hotel chain Travelodge, had Chris Martin & Co. beating out aural Ambien including James Blunt and Norah Jones. Even for a band known to take solace in their overarching pleasantness, the drowsy coronation doubled as a harsh insult. After all, Coldplay is a rock band. A grandma-friendly, Radiohead-normalizing, disarmingly polite rock band led by a man who sounds like he's still yearning for puberty perhaps...but a rock band nonetheless. After proving their stadium bona fides with 2002's bristling A Rush of Blood to the Head, these wuss messiahs fattened up with X&Y, a startlingly bland affair that even forced eternally level-headed New York Times critic Jon Pareles to dub them "the most insufferable band of the decade." The Travelodge survey indicated this considerate foursome wasn't even keeping people awake long enough to piss them off anymore. So Coldplay did what any U2 acolytes worth a chiming guitar chord would do-- they went off to "rip it up and start again." But Viva isn't a complete overhaul á la Achtung Baby or Kid A; just as they dull the sharp corners of their legendary influences musically, Coldplay offer a diluted version of the "experimental" mid-career maneuver with their fourth LP. It's a case of well-honed troubleshooting that should keep the faithful conscious enough to appreciate its subtle improvements.

Ever self-deprecating, Martin offered his band's thesis to MTV a couple weeks ago: "We look at what other people are doing and try and steal all the good bits," he said. "We steal from so many different places that hopefully it becomes untraceable." That last bit is probably wishful thinking. For their "new direction" album, Coldplay hired the egghead responsible for more new direction albums than any other producer over the past 35 years, Brian Eno. The move isn't original, but it's smart. A self-described "sculptor" with a tendency to chip away rather than augment, Eno helps Coldplay reverse their bloat in favor of a slimmer sound; the anthems remain but they're no longer bogged down by incessant refrains and overdubs.

Thanks to a bubbling bit of exotic percussion that wouldn't sound out of place on Peter Gabriel's latter-day LPs, "Lost!" is transformed from Just Another Coldplay Song into a uniquely alluring smash and live staple for years to come. The Gabriel connection is also apparent on the spectacular, wide-eyed "Strawberry Swing", which floats light tribal drums above circular guitars and Martin's idyllic musings. Think "In Your Eyes": The Next Generation. More welcomed semi-surprises: Ballsy first single "Violet Hill" pulls off some honest-to-God Scary Monsters mutant funk while "Chinese Sleep Chant" is a shoegaze excursion as traceable as it is passable. Arcade Fire producer Markus Dravs' touch can be heard on the strung-out anthem "Viva la Vida", its "woah oh oh!" refrain already responsible for untold iPod sales. Apart from a few brief lulls into somnolent twinkle-pop, the music is purposeful, svelte, and modern. If only Martin could inject some pathos into his often-embarrassing universal scripture.

There's a thin line between lyrics that speak to everyone and lyrics that suck-up to everyone (see: Bono's steady devolution over the last couple decades). Even on Coldplay's best songs, Martin sometimes has trouble reconciling his inner hack with his better judgment. On Viva, he backs away from the wallowing self-pity that tanked X&Y, instead going for black-and-white extremes-- life and death, love and lust, dreams and reality-- with little regard for any shades of gray. His supposedly ominous headstone obsession on "Cemeteries of London" is about as creepy as a midday graveyard stroll. And "Lost!" is nearly done in by a cringeworthy verse featuring big fish and a small pond. But there are moments when Martin's band mates push his wide-open words toward more specific meaning. Blissful nostalgia permeates "Strawberry Swing" so thoroughly it's impossible to deny its "perfect day," and the hook to Viva's closer relishes its immortal rush: "I don’t want to follow death and all of his friends!" He may be a pointed critic of his own broadness-- as seen in his guest appearance on "Extras" and in countless humble interviews-- but Martin is still a hopeless sap. He's clearly aware of Thom Yorke's apocalyptic verve and Bono's most cunning reflexive confessionals, but thus far he's incapable of matching either one.

"Lights will guide you home/ And ignite your bones/ And I will try to fix you," sang Martin on X&Y's "Fix You", a gag-inducing bit of motivational flotsam that came off like self-parody. Viva offers a more believable fix to the current Coldplay dilemma, i.e., how does a pop band with artful aspirations please everyone while satisfying themselves at the same time? Because while they ape their forebears without mercy, there's no mistaking a Coldplay song from a U2 or Radiohead song. The new album expands their individuality in tiny, effective ways while maintaining their world-beating gifts. The record's violent, revolution-themed artwork is misleading. Viva is more like a bloodless coup-- shrewd and inconspicuous in its progressive impulses.

Interpol - Antics

2008-07-19T11:25:00.000+01:00

Interpol: Antics
(Matador; 2004)

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Review:

It's hard to imagine what spurred the density and gloom of Turn on the Bright Lights, an album that, in retrospect, sounds like a popular band reacting to massive overexposure; its masterful statement of bruised withdrawal begged to divide a large fanbase, not create one. There was nothing about Interpol's self-contained, visionary debut that might have suggested their subsequent eyebrow-raising catapult to fame, particularly given their aversion to the traditional single format. Perhaps Paul Banks' lucid expression of discontent and impending dread spoke to an increasingly frustrated audience inundated by a generalized threat. Or maybe Interpol's popularity is simply a case of viscerally powerful music confounding formulas of public taste, breaking through purely on the basis of songwriting merit. Either way, Bright Lights set an immeasurably high mark to follow, and its popularity has ensured equally high stakes: If the band stumbles, their humiliation will be very public.

Fortunately, the members of Interpol understand what other bands take for granted: Careers aren't necessarily made or broken by second albums alone, and an ideal follow-up needn't engage the perceived potential of a defining debut or consciously redefine a pre-established sound in order to be effective. Redefinition, in particular, is a non-issue for Interpol, because one of the most enduring pleasures of their first album is its timeless singularity. Accordingly, it has been well understood that Antics wasn't going to be, nor could it be, Bright Lights 2. Bootleg versions of new material-- notably the live recordings of "Narc" and "Length of Love" that leaked last summer-- didn't suggest a radically altered aesthetic or faceless repetition, nor does Antics deliver either. Interpol avoid common sophomore pitfalls because they refuse to engage the immense weight that surrounds this release, and their tenuous position between shrewd self-consciousness and diversionary costume changing informs this album's openness and plasticity.

Antics exudes a preceding aura of heaviness-- even the packaging is heavy; the album's cryptic liner notes consist of little more than stark grayscale photos and epigrammatic Morse code spelling out bits of song titles ("Length", "Narc", "Cruise", "Exit", respectively). An image from the band's debut appears on the first single, "Slow Hands", and becomes a representative metaphor for the album as a whole: After reflecting on the aftermath of a soured relationship, Banks takes the "weights" described in Bright Lights' "Obstacle 1" from his "little heart" and projects them onto the woman who presumably put them there to begin with. Musically, however, the song is far removed from the layered density of Interpol's former material, exhibiting pristine, unmuddied production and a chorus ("We spies/ We slow hands/ You put the weights all around yourself") that slithers and stomps with post-punk dance-floor swagger. Similarly, Antics casts off the weight of advance hype, stewing anticipation, and unreasonable expectations, and wisely distinguises itself as a strong collection of singles rather than as an immaculately cohesive album. And, where Interpol were once synonymous with emotive desolation, they here opt for an atmosphere of poignant resignation.

Opener "Next Exit" is immediately jarring; a tranquilized doo-wop organ progression and spare percussion announce a very different band. It is explicitly clear that Interpol have changed, from the band's more casual tone ("We ain't going to the town/ We're going to the city/ Gonna track this shit around") to new mixing techniques: Carlos D's bass and Daniel Kessler's guitar are relatively hushed in the mix to make room for Banks' underscored vocals, allowing him a range of expression previously unexplored and buoying the band's newfound pop leanings with lyrical eloquence. His vocals on tracks like "Narc" soar where they were once buried in the impermeable fog of their surroundings, and many who found his delivery in the past to be occasionally monotonous (company that includes Banks himself) will find his melodic range here to be a welcome change of pace.

Although most songs evince a clear shift to singles territory, a natural progression of the band's sound is evident. "Evil" employs a Pixies-esque bassline and upbeat rhythm section to counterbalance its ambiguously bleak lyrical themes. The band demonstrates judicious restraint on "Narc", relegating a potentially overbearing blanket of synth strings and organ to a peripheral role while punching up Kessler's crisp guitar lines and Carlos D's almost imperceptibly fluid bass work. The syncopated funk bassline and disco-pop rhythm of "Length of Love" initially seem to be at odds with the song's lush orchestration, but these counter-intuitive touches add a dynamic element to the limited confines of the song's composition. The band hasn't lost its knack for exploration and epic construction, though; "Take You on a Cruise", "Not Even Jail", and "Public Pervert" steep the album's middle section in the kind of dark theatricality that distinguished their debut, while the expansive "A Time to Be So Small", with its deliberate pacing and depiction of "cadaverous mobs," concludes Antics with unsettling macabre.

Though Interpol couldn't be expected to surpass their previous heights, it's difficult to imagine a savvier or more satisfying second step. But the real revelation is that the band has wisely ignored a shortsighted perception of their career which dictates that where Bright Lights was an audacious plunge from a great height, Antics is the crucial landing. Even on those terms the band has succeeded. However, their liberation of form emphasizes the fact that, in the grand scheme of Interpol's career, this is only one in a series of great, if not Great, albums. Antics shows Interpol shedding the weight of their accumulated baggage and (hopefully) staying a while.
- David Moore, September 27, 2004