Douglas Martin makes money like Fred Astaire.
As these words are being written, it is ten years to the day of the release of Interpol’s second album, Antics. Though wading through the murk we call life has taught me to never be fully certain of anything because the card is perpetually subject to change, I’m at least pretty sure that if I were neck-first in my thirties in 2004, I would have hated Interpol. For years, Douglas Martin’s Dirty Shoes have tapped at your doorstep mostly with an aversion to the slick, trendy, major music magazine-tested “indie-rock” canon, which Interpol was near the head of even before the release of 2002’s Turn on the Bright Lights. But as much as our tastes and what we like about art grow and change through the treacherous process called aging, we can’t change the people we were. Weirdly enough, this leads to some startling revelations.
It would be one thing to say through revisitation, I’ve found Antics to be a deeply enjoyable album in spite of the depths Interpol has plumbed since then, in spite of the band checking fewer of the boxes on my aesthetic preferences list in these early days of Autumn 2014. The truth is I never stopped liking this record, and its replay value now is every bit as high as it was when its CD case — compact discs, ha, another telltale sign that the times really have changed — was starting its long residency on top of my changer and the copy I had burned for my car never left the deck.
Listening to Antics over and over again and still not tiring of it made me wonder about its staying power. Though Bright Lights is generally considered the crowning achievement of Interpol, the NYC (then-)foursome’s sophomore set showcases them at the height of their powers. Is it a better album? Not necessarily. But it’s at least just as good, because it both streamlines and emphasizes what made Interpol one of the marquee bands of the early part of this century.
Art by Flavia
Easily the most frustrating thing about Interpol is how easy it is to take stock of their parts. Daniel Kessler’s single-note guitar strokes. Paul Banks’ Ian Curtis-meets-WALL-E-meets-Steven Q. Urkel singing voice. The metronomic precision of the rhythm section. The atmosphere (think dark halls with cathedral ceilings). The GQ-advertisement-ready suits. The often-laughable lyrics. That’s all there is to Interpol, isn’t it?
You could take surface-level inventory of any band and find excuses to write them off. We do such things with art every day in order to justify not paying attention to it. The key to understanding why some bands work is seeing how well those separate pieces move together and the places they move toward. Antics-era Interpol configured their individual components to hit all their marks in-sync with one another and made sure nothing was out of place, much like their much-ballyhooed aesthetic.
Part of their appeal was not just that they equaled to more the sum of their parts, but that sum itself was worth talking about. They were a band, an entity. When you see the members of Interpol together, photographed in their pristine suits and sunglasses and their haphazardly tied ties, you knew that, regardless of what you thought about the music. And many people thought many things about the music. There’s the base template of that early-80’s post-punk, more specifically, the stylish, dour, late-night musing soundtrack of Joy Division, and that’s what they seemed to exemplify to many listeners. But Paul Banks only sang like Ian Curtis; in all actuality, Banks was a debonair young man emotionally navigating his way through the faux-stylish drug use of being a mid-level rock star, disguising his nerdier impulses and hip-hop obsession to drearily paint himself as a besuited vagabond of the New York party scene, quipping that he’s “timeless like a broken watch.”
A few years ago, I posited a theory on Tumblr that Carlos D. was simultaneously the best and worst member of Interpol. Of course, there are loads and loads of evidence to support that latter segment. Case in point, his infamous quote of, “I think ironic expression through clothing is very important,” right around the time he dressed like a high-ranking Nazi soldier. But aside from that, and the sort of goth club playboy persona he seemed to cultivate during the strong years of Interpol, he was never better as a musician.
Listen to your average Interpol song and it’s easy to tell how Carlos D. made every Interpol song better on Antics. The single-notes and even the drumming don’t nearly reach the heights of D. using the bass in a melodic way rather than just a complementary tool to help out the drums. The descending bassline of “Not Even Jail,” next to the grace of the bassline in “Public Pervert,” not to mention the gorgeous build to the end coda. Stuff like this is all over the album, and it’s thanks to Carlos D.’s approach to making his bass a compositional counterpart to the “lead” melody, which were the guitars.
But what really broke Interpol out of those dour Bright Lights doldrums was their desire to color in some of their monochromatic scheme with some shades of other colors in the form of pop songs. “Evil” had one of those choruses that grabbed you by the throat, in addition to establishing Banks as the somewhat-goofy romantic in the impeccable suit. But it was a big song with a big chorus. And so were “Slow Hands” and “C’mere,” the latter of which being a — gasp! — traditional love song.
It’s no big mystery that when Capitol signed Interpol, those were the songs the major label was paying attention to. They may never have even gotten a major label deal if it weren’t for their willingness to craft such pop tunes and put them on equal billing with their more serious efforts. They probably never would have gotten a major label deal on the strength of Turn on the Bright Lights, just because the band hadn’t yet shown they could light up as well as they do. They had the classic album in their belt, but it surely wasn’t enough to break out from the pack of scores and scores of Interpol sound-alike bands.
And with that was their actual signing to the major leagues, where they lost the magic they captured on Antics. Our Love to Admire, even still sporting the same lineup, suffered from hubris and fragmentation; it was a period where the band felt they needed to find themselves again, to possibly be something different than what they were. And while it led to some interesting experiments (“Pioneer to the Falls,” “The Lighthouse”), the all-hands-on-deck chemistry was not there. The mighty Interpol were hemorrhaging right before our very eyes. And they would spend the next few years trying to capture the synergy they had on Antics, right up until the departure of Carlos D., and that’s when the nail in the coffin hit. Antics was an anomaly of sorts, to where the results weren’t quite the same. Maybe they captured lightning in a bottle. Maybe they realized what worked and then lost it. But the much-derided classic still remains, a masterwork hidden in the guise of the sophomore slump.
