Novelty
I think I have a reasonable amount of loyalty to the bands I like. I’m not a raving completist, but I do like to have all of a band’s worthwhile albums, and will generally give overlooked or underrated albums at least a couple of spins. I have rushed down to the record shop the day an album has been released, and have counted the days to various release dates. I generally give albums multiple listens before passing ultimate judgement, (I have even done this with bands I do not like just because I feel I ought to have given their music a chance), and I enjoy coming back to records and hearing them in a new light. In short, I think I have reasonable grounds for saying that I’m an open-minded music fan with a fair degree of loyalty to bands I like. Hell, due to (perhaps foolish) undying devotion to certain pop groups, I have listened to Tales From Topographic Oceans, Earthbound and Cerebral Caustic on numerous occasions just in case I was missing something (the short answer is, I wasn’t). So, it is with a heavy heart that I write this article about two bands whose recent dreadful albums have caused my love for them to cool to the point of apathy. And yes, I am talking about indie-pop’s most universally adored heroes, The Arcade Fire and Interpol.
There are similarities. When Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights appeared in 2002, it felt like a genuine breath of fresh air and a rebirth of potential for a tired and hackneyed genre, as did The Arcade Fire’s Funeral in 2004. Although neither band could claim to be original, both drew from familiar sources to produce music that stood out from the glut of contemporary indie releases by the same two virtues – songwriting talent and emotional impact. The records initially caught your ear because of the (then) novelty of their reference points – Interpol drew on post-punk heroes such as Joy Division and Echo and The Bunnymen and then brought it up to date with a vaguely post-rock sheen, The Arcade Fire mixed up the more standard Bowie and Roxy Music fixations with a love of Neutral Milk Hotel – but the more you listened to them, the more you realized that both albums were very much a product of modern times, each dealing gracefully and touchingly with the angst and confusion of the modern world without slipping into the glib sentimentality and gauche generalizations characteristic of the many post-Radiohead bands who have tried the same thing. Both album’s stark emotional honesty and fresh musical approach reaffirmed faith in a genre that was drowning in its own slick ennui and dearth of ideas. Turn On The Bright Lights and Funeral are, ultimately, great albums that this decade will be remembered for and judged by.
All this, of course, puts huge and unreasonable pressure on the band for the follow up. Both bands took a long time with their next album, during which time expectations soared and musical landscapes changed. When Interpol returned with Antics in 2004, a horde of bands had sprung up drawing from similar musical influences, and their thunder as the biggest post-punk revivalists had been stolen by Franz Ferdinand’s meteoric rise. By the time The Arcade Fire released Neon Bible in 2007, The Arctic Monkeys had become the biggest thing since sliced Oasis thanks to the internet, and The Arcade Fire’s
similar word-of-mouth success had risen to the point where they were greeted as returning heroes in the press, with wide-scale media coverage that would have been unthinkable for Funeral. Interpol return this month to the same environment with their third album, Our Love To Admire. It is a truism that this leads to an unfavourable environment for the second album to be released into, and often results in the album being unable to live up to the expectations of the first, causing a backlash amongst the press and hardcore fans. Indeed, greater bands then The Arcade Fire and Interpol have fallen victim to Second Album Syndrome, and these albums are often slated unfairly for being unable to live up to the promise of the debut. Interestingly enough, in both The Arcade Fire’s and Interpol’s cases, there has been no such backlash – in fact both bands’ stock in trade has increased recently if anything. But it is my personal and ever so humble opinion that Neon Bible and Antics and Our Love To Admire are awful awful albums. And, as usual, I’m right.
Before I start on the warpath, I would like to stress again that TOTBL and Funeral are fantastic albums which I will always love greatly, and anyone who disagrees is wrong. Again, there are a number of interesting similarities in Interpol’s and Arcade Fire’s flawed follow-ups. Both of the groups’ debut albums were individual and mysterious. Neither band is perfect, but on their first album they played their flaws to their advantage. On their sophomore albums, the groups both opt for a more direct approach, and the brilliant shroud of illusion that made their debuts so special is roughly pulled away to reveal both groups as considerably less compelling then they at first seemed. It didn’t matter that both groups’ lyrics were not up to much – on the first albums they were delivered with a conviction, desperation and simple honesty that imbued them with a real emotional punch that belied their clumsiness. However, on Neon Bible, Win Butler suddenly realizes that loads of disaffected teenagers are listening to him, and decides he has to earnestly deal with Big Issues, to which his sledgehammer-like subtlety is not best suited. The end result is that, before you can say U2, his simple directness which allowed him to deal so well with emotional situations is grossly misused, resulting in an overbearing and preachy record. I don’t really need to remind anyone of how dreadful Interpol’s lyrics always are, but on Antics Paul Banks’ vocals are put right up to the top of the mix, so instead of nervously mumbling his clumsy non-sequitors, which gave the songs an endearing emotional openness, he bellows them over the top of the music, directing attention to Interpol’s weakest aspect.
However, shoddy lyrics are not the only problem on these albums. Antics reveals that Interpol have also been taking unnecessary cues from U2, as their music becomes more overbearing and anthemic, and at the same time, less interesting. One of the things that made TOTBL a great record and bucked the Joy Division rip-off claims of Interpol’s detractors is the rhythm section of Carlos D and Sam Fogarino. The complex interplay of the bass and drums led the songs, providing an exciting and unconventional contrast to the mumbled lyrics and atmospheric guitars. On Antics, the rhythm section are pushed more and more to the background, allowing Daniel Kessler’s increasingly mundane guitar lines and Paul Banks’ week vocals centre stage, which makes for much duller listening. Another side effect of this is that the songs become more conventional, no longer taking the eccentric twists and turn that made ‘Obstacle 1’ and ‘Leif Erikson’ so compelling. The music suffers, and Antics’ two standout moments appear on Evil, where some of the old bass-and-drums interplay is allowed to return, and Take You On A Cruise, where Kessler actually bothers to write an interesting guitar line and the band deviate slightly from standard verse-chorus-verse song structure. Sadly, Antics has not made Interpol aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and Our Love To Admire sees their continued descent into blandness and irrelevance, replete with anthemic choruses and extended guitar solos. Ironically, although Interpol’s initial musical strengths and oblique songwriting made them much more then the talentless post-punk rip-offs they are so often derided for being, their attempts to court mainstream popularity have turned them into a poor man’s version of early U2.
Neon Bible presents a similar case of a band ironically becoming everything they were initially wrongly accused of being. Those not held in thrall to Funeral accused The Arcade Fire of being overbearing and unnecessarily bombastic, with limited harmonic range and poor vocals. However, Funeral contrasted its moments of bombast and orchestral overkill with moments of quiet tenderness, and the limitations of the band’s musical and vocal ability were used to their best advantage to produce adventurously written and intensely performed songs. Neon Bible is a different beast. In an interview with Mojo magazine last year, Win Butler admitted to suffering from writer’s block before being able to write the album, which, combined with the fact that a song from one of the band’s early EPs is used to flesh out the record, does not bode well. The simple fact here is that the songs are just not as good. Thoroughly prosaic and unimaginative chord sequences and song structures replace the imaginative writing of the debut – whereas Funeral’s wide palette was able to produce such exotic songs as ‘Une année sans lumière’’s reimagining of French chanson and ‘In The Backseat’’s outBjorking of Bjork, Neon Bible sounds like Arcade Fire by numbers. The album in general suffers from what I like to call Be Here Now Syndrome, where a band tries to compensate for a lack of musical ideas by overlaying songs with unneccesary instrumental parts that do not add anything musically different to the song. Neon Bible features loads of organs, string quartets, you name it, all of which enter the song to play the same line as the main melody, which itself is confined to blindly following the lead notes of the chords. This is in stark contrast to Funeral’s imaginitive yet simple arrangements and strong individual melodies. Hard as it may be to believe, Neon Bible sounds like The Arcade Fire have run out of musical ideas.
And yet despite this, Neon Bible and Our Love To Admire seem poised to send Interpol and The Arcade Fire further into full-blown mainstream success. Both groups are merely a shadow of the revolutionary force they once were, reduced to vicious and satirical caricatures of their former selves. I will always love both bands’ first albums, but I cannot bring myself to listen to Neon Bible, Antics or Our Love To Admire. And, coming from someone who has put up with bands through thick and thin in the vain hope that they might recapture some of their former glory, that’s saying something. I await with a mixture of trepidation and blind hope both groups’ next album, longing for them to realize all they have lost and somehow manage to recapture it. But I’m not holding my breath.
There are similarities. When Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights appeared in 2002, it felt like a genuine breath of fresh air and a rebirth of potential for a tired and hackneyed genre, as did The Arcade Fire’s Funeral in 2004. Although neither band could claim to be original, both drew from familiar sources to produce music that stood out from the glut of contemporary indie releases by the same two virtues – songwriting talent and emotional impact. The records initially caught your ear because of the (then) novelty of their reference points – Interpol drew on post-punk heroes such as Joy Division and Echo and The Bunnymen and then brought it up to date with a vaguely post-rock sheen, The Arcade Fire mixed up the more standard Bowie and Roxy Music fixations with a love of Neutral Milk Hotel – but the more you listened to them, the more you realized that both albums were very much a product of modern times, each dealing gracefully and touchingly with the angst and confusion of the modern world without slipping into the glib sentimentality and gauche generalizations characteristic of the many post-Radiohead bands who have tried the same thing. Both album’s stark emotional honesty and fresh musical approach reaffirmed faith in a genre that was drowning in its own slick ennui and dearth of ideas. Turn On The Bright Lights and Funeral are, ultimately, great albums that this decade will be remembered for and judged by.
All this, of course, puts huge and unreasonable pressure on the band for the follow up. Both bands took a long time with their next album, during which time expectations soared and musical landscapes changed. When Interpol returned with Antics in 2004, a horde of bands had sprung up drawing from similar musical influences, and their thunder as the biggest post-punk revivalists had been stolen by Franz Ferdinand’s meteoric rise. By the time The Arcade Fire released Neon Bible in 2007, The Arctic Monkeys had become the biggest thing since sliced Oasis thanks to the internet, and The Arcade Fire’s
similar word-of-mouth success had risen to the point where they were greeted as returning heroes in the press, with wide-scale media coverage that would have been unthinkable for Funeral. Interpol return this month to the same environment with their third album, Our Love To Admire. It is a truism that this leads to an unfavourable environment for the second album to be released into, and often results in the album being unable to live up to the expectations of the first, causing a backlash amongst the press and hardcore fans. Indeed, greater bands then The Arcade Fire and Interpol have fallen victim to Second Album Syndrome, and these albums are often slated unfairly for being unable to live up to the promise of the debut. Interestingly enough, in both The Arcade Fire’s and Interpol’s cases, there has been no such backlash – in fact both bands’ stock in trade has increased recently if anything. But it is my personal and ever so humble opinion that Neon Bible and Antics and Our Love To Admire are awful awful albums. And, as usual, I’m right.
Before I start on the warpath, I would like to stress again that TOTBL and Funeral are fantastic albums which I will always love greatly, and anyone who disagrees is wrong. Again, there are a number of interesting similarities in Interpol’s and Arcade Fire’s flawed follow-ups. Both of the groups’ debut albums were individual and mysterious. Neither band is perfect, but on their first album they played their flaws to their advantage. On their sophomore albums, the groups both opt for a more direct approach, and the brilliant shroud of illusion that made their debuts so special is roughly pulled away to reveal both groups as considerably less compelling then they at first seemed. It didn’t matter that both groups’ lyrics were not up to much – on the first albums they were delivered with a conviction, desperation and simple honesty that imbued them with a real emotional punch that belied their clumsiness. However, on Neon Bible, Win Butler suddenly realizes that loads of disaffected teenagers are listening to him, and decides he has to earnestly deal with Big Issues, to which his sledgehammer-like subtlety is not best suited. The end result is that, before you can say U2, his simple directness which allowed him to deal so well with emotional situations is grossly misused, resulting in an overbearing and preachy record. I don’t really need to remind anyone of how dreadful Interpol’s lyrics always are, but on Antics Paul Banks’ vocals are put right up to the top of the mix, so instead of nervously mumbling his clumsy non-sequitors, which gave the songs an endearing emotional openness, he bellows them over the top of the music, directing attention to Interpol’s weakest aspect.
However, shoddy lyrics are not the only problem on these albums. Antics reveals that Interpol have also been taking unnecessary cues from U2, as their music becomes more overbearing and anthemic, and at the same time, less interesting. One of the things that made TOTBL a great record and bucked the Joy Division rip-off claims of Interpol’s detractors is the rhythm section of Carlos D and Sam Fogarino. The complex interplay of the bass and drums led the songs, providing an exciting and unconventional contrast to the mumbled lyrics and atmospheric guitars. On Antics, the rhythm section are pushed more and more to the background, allowing Daniel Kessler’s increasingly mundane guitar lines and Paul Banks’ week vocals centre stage, which makes for much duller listening. Another side effect of this is that the songs become more conventional, no longer taking the eccentric twists and turn that made ‘Obstacle 1’ and ‘Leif Erikson’ so compelling. The music suffers, and Antics’ two standout moments appear on Evil, where some of the old bass-and-drums interplay is allowed to return, and Take You On A Cruise, where Kessler actually bothers to write an interesting guitar line and the band deviate slightly from standard verse-chorus-verse song structure. Sadly, Antics has not made Interpol aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and Our Love To Admire sees their continued descent into blandness and irrelevance, replete with anthemic choruses and extended guitar solos. Ironically, although Interpol’s initial musical strengths and oblique songwriting made them much more then the talentless post-punk rip-offs they are so often derided for being, their attempts to court mainstream popularity have turned them into a poor man’s version of early U2.
Neon Bible presents a similar case of a band ironically becoming everything they were initially wrongly accused of being. Those not held in thrall to Funeral accused The Arcade Fire of being overbearing and unnecessarily bombastic, with limited harmonic range and poor vocals. However, Funeral contrasted its moments of bombast and orchestral overkill with moments of quiet tenderness, and the limitations of the band’s musical and vocal ability were used to their best advantage to produce adventurously written and intensely performed songs. Neon Bible is a different beast. In an interview with Mojo magazine last year, Win Butler admitted to suffering from writer’s block before being able to write the album, which, combined with the fact that a song from one of the band’s early EPs is used to flesh out the record, does not bode well. The simple fact here is that the songs are just not as good. Thoroughly prosaic and unimaginative chord sequences and song structures replace the imaginative writing of the debut – whereas Funeral’s wide palette was able to produce such exotic songs as ‘Une année sans lumière’’s reimagining of French chanson and ‘In The Backseat’’s outBjorking of Bjork, Neon Bible sounds like Arcade Fire by numbers. The album in general suffers from what I like to call Be Here Now Syndrome, where a band tries to compensate for a lack of musical ideas by overlaying songs with unneccesary instrumental parts that do not add anything musically different to the song. Neon Bible features loads of organs, string quartets, you name it, all of which enter the song to play the same line as the main melody, which itself is confined to blindly following the lead notes of the chords. This is in stark contrast to Funeral’s imaginitive yet simple arrangements and strong individual melodies. Hard as it may be to believe, Neon Bible sounds like The Arcade Fire have run out of musical ideas.
And yet despite this, Neon Bible and Our Love To Admire seem poised to send Interpol and The Arcade Fire further into full-blown mainstream success. Both groups are merely a shadow of the revolutionary force they once were, reduced to vicious and satirical caricatures of their former selves. I will always love both bands’ first albums, but I cannot bring myself to listen to Neon Bible, Antics or Our Love To Admire. And, coming from someone who has put up with bands through thick and thin in the vain hope that they might recapture some of their former glory, that’s saying something. I await with a mixture of trepidation and blind hope both groups’ next album, longing for them to realize all they have lost and somehow manage to recapture it. But I’m not holding my breath.
posted by Jonathan Thornton at 5:31 pm
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