Interpol - 'Our Love To Admire' (Parlophone) Released 09/07/07

What both ‘No I…’ and ‘Mammoth’ flag up is that, for all the talk of live brass sections and of keyboards being newly-prominent in the songwriting process, Interpol are still working from what is an essentially limited palette, and when this formula doesn’t work the result is alarmingly close to vacant bluster rather than the spiky emotional moments of revelation that their best music produces. Whether Interpol themselves have realised this is a point worth considering, because from ‘Pace Is The Trick’ onwards ‘Our Love…’ appears to shift down gear with spectacular results. There’s a lightness to the glistening lines, a measured momentum, that reaches a peak in the most prominent drum work on the album. Even better is ‘All Fired Up’, which arrives on a cascade of guitar that sounds like a clear nod to Jonny Greenwood (and more specifically the riff to ‘I Might Be Wrong’), and sees Banks once again addressing the state of his soul. Throughout the album his lyrics remain poised between acid-tongued barbs (“I dream of you draped in wires and leaning on the breaks”) on the one hand and being wilfully impenetrable on the other (“My son you sleep in clouds of fire” from the funereal ‘The Scale’ being a particular highlight).

This closing section of ‘Our Love To Admire’ is something else entirely. The four tracks from ‘Rest My Chemistry’ through to the climatic grandeur of ‘The Lighthouse’ (with the exception of ‘Who Do You Think’) are subtle, stripped back and reverberate with the sort of atmospheric, unhurried grace that is normally the sole reserve of post-rockers too in thrall to the likes of My Bloody Valentine. There’s no throbbing bass, little of their trademark icy guitar, just Paul Banks’ mournful vocals and a minimal backing. It’s the sort of sound that you feel Interpol have always had the ambition to explore (especially on some of the first record’s more quiet moments), but here the results are so striking, so overwhelmingly convincing, that ‘Our Love To Admire’ suddenly makes sense as a cohesive work, one intelligently sequenced so that were you to listen to all three records back-to-back you’d be left immediately convinced that Interpol are pointing the way forward to what could be an immense, and radically altered fourth album.

Beginning with a flourish and ending with an understated beauty, ‘Our Love To Admire’ is an album that ensures Interpol, even after five years of constant exposure, excited speculation and insinuations that they’re nothing more than an 80s’ trenchcoat-clad depressives’ fantasy, remain a compelling, devotional-worthy group.