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INTERPOL
SHADES OF GRAY
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If Interpol’s ties to Joy Division wasn’t obvious enough in the deadpan voice and blocky phrasing of singer Paul Banks, the interlocking guitar and bass figures that are their musical bedrock, and their stiff-spined stage demeanor, then there was the fog. All-consuming clouds of the stuff covered the Orpheum Theatre stage a week ago Wednesday, and everything on it, including Interpol, whose members looked from just a few rows out like wraiths, risen to bring their version of elevating rock-and-roll gloom. That fog suggested a Manchester sunrise — the way fingers of light filter through the haze of industrial misery that has long clung to the city where Joy Division, the Buzzcocks, and so many other great English bands were born, if not smelted. But Interpol, who hail from New York City, are one ocean and two decades away from Joy Division’s brief golden years. And not as propulsive or elegant, even when they’re essaying the textural shifts of e-bowed guitar, piano, and chiming choruses in numbers like "Take You on a Cruise," which nonetheless manages to do just that. Their music is also not as diverse, which may explain why the packed crowd seemed to shout out requests for just one song, the radio hit "The Specialist." That number was a beauty, with its slow bass introducing Banks’s warmest vocal performance before adding layers of guitars and keyboards as it swelled to a climax. In the end, Interpol’s repetitive mid-tempo arrangements — which made tunes with a more peppery blood flow like "Slow Hands" (from their second album, Antics, on Matador) standouts — and Banks’s delivery rendered the band as monochromatic as the fog they hid in. Rather than coming off as the art-punk resurrectionists they could be, Interpol proved mere shoegazers with a fistful of good tricks and tics they keep recycling. It’s not that there’s no there there: the band’s nattering licks and light-flecked shades-of-gray sound have a darkly distinct emotional character. It’s just that live they need more colors and more imagination to keep from slipping into boredom’s Elysian Fields. No such trouble with openers Q and Not U. The Washington (DC) trio bristled with energy and a weird disconnected ambition that rumbled from the stage in frontman Christopher Richards’s awkward but blissful dancing and recycled disco bass lines, John Davis’s plain businesslike drumbeats, and Harris Klahr’s stabs of keyboard and guitar. Persnickety observers might suggest less "E" and more practice. Every song seemed tentative and staccato, or like a fish dropped on a dock, flopping and gasping for survival. Perhaps they’re clever dance-rock deconstructionists developing their own agenda. If not, they need to figure out how to put a tune together.
BY TED DROZDOWSKI
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