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).