Just like The Strokes, Interpol quickly discovered that when you start at the top, there is nowhere to go but down. They developed in reverse, from the subtlety of their first album to banal riff rock, from suggestive lyrics that made no sense to annoying ones that you wished made less, from a song called “Untitled” to a song called “No I in Threesome.” Everything they did between 2002 and now made it easy to believe that TOTBL had been an inexplicable, Button-esque miracle. The question facing El Pintor, Interpol’s new album and their first in four years, is whether they are capable of reversing or even slowing that decline.
The initial data are not promising. El Pintor does not sound like Turn On the Bright Lights, not in the slightest. In fact, of all Interpol’s subsequent albums, this one might sound the least like their debut. It’s all jagged edges and pinched guitar tones and thundering drums; in short, it’s roughly what you’d expect from a bunch of guys who grew up listening to Joy Division and Television, regardless of whether Interpol’s members actually fit that description (I bet they do).
But as Interpol themselves proved on their most recent self-titled release, listening to good music doesn’t guarantee making it. The first 46 seconds of El Pintor sound like a band about to offer still more evidence of this: “All the Rage Back Home” begins with just the sort of aimless guitar noodling that cannibalized Interpol’s original sound over the course of their second through fourth albums. But then the drums and bass kick in, delivering the most unapologetic thump that Interpol have ever offered, saving the song and maybe even the whole disc in the process. All the same, this is still no match for the sheer scale of Interpol’s downward spiral.
To their credit, Interpol now have a sound capable of powering a song. After Antics, with the band caught between trying to replicate their first album and knowing that they might never be able to, their songs began to feel hollow: neither driven by one part, nor more than the sum of any. That problem has been fixed on El Pintor, if in a somewhat uninspiring way. Their reverse aging brings them to another first album of sorts: rather than cringeworthy or dull, El Pintor sounds like the debut album of a moderately edgy New York band who could eventually be great. The grooves are powerful, the guitars searing, and on songs like “Anywhere” those two elements fuse into a coherent and propulsive whole. Singer Paul Banks seems happy with the transition: “Fuck the ancient ways!” he sings on the guitar tour-de-force “Ancient Ways.”
But if El Pintor improves upon the limp concoctions we suffered through on Interpol’s last album, it is not a return to greatness or even a step in its general direction. In fact, the music suffers from poor songwriting, the ultimate hallmark of Interpol’s Buttonization. Guitars have always been Interpol’s driving force, but El Pintor is perforated with crude riffing whose absence madeTOTBL so great. Instead of riffs, the guitars on that album played eighth notes with no breaks, driving through series of chords and drifting through washes of sound. The only moments where they stop to breathe, on “NYC” and “Stella Was a Diver,” catch you for that exact reason. It’s quite remarkable, actually— an entire album where the guitars act like drums. Sadly, on El Pintor, they’re back to acting like guitars. Obvious riffs have been one of the most predictable and disappointing developments in Interpol’s fall from grace, and while the guitar playing is more inspired here, you don’t listen to Interpol to hear them shred. You listen to Interpol to hear guitars swell and smolder in the background while Paul Banks talks about all 200 of his couches or murmurs that he’s sick of spending these lonely nights training himself not to care. Because even if the words don’t seem to mean much, the whole of TOTBLoozes something dark and beautiful, something that Interpol haven’t come close to recreating since. In the aftermath of such a mysterious success, El Pintor is Interpol’s furthest step away from any trace of an identity.