| That Interpol bring an unusually diligent ethic to the table, then, is surprising enough all by itself. That they’d further risk total invisibility by infusing their songs with an almost untenably dense melancholy is what makes them great instead of interesting. This, too, is a formalist trope: the almost programmatic contention that forms have inherent qualities. I know poets who’d pull a knife on you for saying as much -- the idea, say, that haiku is inherently contemplative, or that a sonnet carries a certain lightness of mood somewhere inside its fourteen-line frame -- but Interpol let the work do the talking. “If you’re going to write songs that adhere to this sort of structure,” they seem to be saying, “then this is what they’ll feel like if you’re doing it right.” |