Album Review: Interpol - El Pintor

Interpol get a hard time for sounding a lot like Interpol. The charge is that, after several engaging albums, the New Yorkers are slouching towards creative dotage, regurgitating a grab-bag of tics and tropes: clanging guitars, brooding melodies, Ian Curtis-esque singing from frontman Paul Banks.

In so far as the group have a distinctive aesthetic and stick to it rigorously, their detractors have a point. Some reviews of their fifth LP, El Pintor, have accused Interpol of transmuting into their own covers project. The dig isn’t inaccurate, but is a little unfair: would their nay-sayers be happier if the band reinvented themselves as a mariachi troupe, or as EDM exponents? What’s wrong with honing your expertise?

The claim that El Pintor — Spanish for ‘the painter’ and an anagram of ‘Interpol’ — is a further recycling of their post-goth formula doesn’t tell the entire story. Granted, the familiar atmospherics are present and correct: Banks’ dark, velvet croon, Dan Kessler’s ‘Sergio Leone fronts Sisters Of Mercy’ guitars (he composes while watching old movies, and here you imagine him seated in front of Apocalypse Now and The Good the Bad and the Ugly).

What’s changed is that, for the first time since 2004’s Antics LP, the now three-piece (Banks takes over for departed bassist Carlos Dengler) seem hungry and angry. Speaking to the Irish Examiner in 2011, Kessler said he didn’t read his reviews, yet here there is a vivid sense Interpol want to stick it to the critics.

El Pintor explodes out of the traps: opener ‘All The Rage Back Home’ is brash, even buoyant, with a solid chorus; ‘My Desire’ is the group’s most epic five minutes since early favourite, ‘Stella Was A Diver And She Was Always Down’.

Yes, some of the vim drains away: it can feel like you are lost within a never-ending Kessler solo, over which Banks mumbles gloomily. But such lulls are fleeting and cannot obscure the fact that El Pintor’s finest tracks are as accomplished as any in Interpol’s catalogue.