| Which is exactly the difference between Interpol and the ten thousand or so bands that’ve been aping eighties moves for bar money these past couple of years. (When will this trend end, anyhow? Is there a limit to how much mining people are allowed to do in the fertile fields of the first two Public Image Ltd. albums, or shall we just call the eighties revival “PiLcore” and be done with it?) On their debut album, Interpol sound like people who have seen a vision and decided to follow it. It’s in the album’s unbendingly mournful mood, and in how tense the overall feeling is: it’s in the cool detachment of the band’s professionalism. It’s as if their commitment to the structures of their songs is so great that they’re afraid something bad might happen were they to stray from the path. Culturally speaking, we tend to pooh-pooh the idea of control; advertising is full of voices that extol the virtues of pulling out all the stops and indulging oneself in the pleasures of bleeding-edge experiences. Let us not forget that James Brown’s band used to routinely locate the burning nexus of ecstasy not in wild abandon but at the outer reaches of control and discipline, and that locating this same point on the map was what made “Master of Puppets” such a charging beast of a record. |