Our Love To Admire

But for both ["The Heinrich Maneuver" and "Mammoth"], and indeed elsewhere, it's the way in which the elements of the track click into place with a Swiss watchmaker's precision and artistry that really hits home.

The outcome is akin to an artistic explosion.

With giant gyrating reverberated guitars and a grandiose brass section, this is the sound of a rock band attempting the sweeping gallantry of Sibelius or Tchaikovsky and getting away with it. It represents a smugly victorious ending to what is a phenomenally strong and well-polished album.

Probably a track or two short of being a stone-cold classic, Our Love To Admire nonetheless makes for hugely rewarding listening.

The black-clad New York quartet still sounds inflexibly menacing, grasping tighter than ever to its doomy post-punk influences and delving further into frontman Paul Banks's emotional unrest.

Our Love to Admire fleshes out the dark edges of Interpol's sound to create a polished, muscular-sounding record that teems with life and bristling potency.

The New York quartet retains its flair for dramatic images and ominous guitar lines on its major-label debut, but with producer/ mixer Rich Costey onboard, these signatures uncoil into more complex soundscapes.

The foreboding melancholy of "Turn on the Bright Lights" has eroded into a sound that's less idiosyncratic; by design or accident, that broad-brush aesthetic coincides with the band's move from an indie label (Matador) to a major one (Capitol).

Interpol have made a great album.

It’s a majestic, grandiose, machine-tooled album, subtly orchestrated with gothic pianos and doomy organs.

In terms of writing and production, this may be Interpol at their best.

Editors show they're ready to take over with the spacious, stately love-conquers-all tune "The Weight of the World" or the pop-philosophy of the twitchy, pulse-pounding title track.

It’s the type of strung-out confession that fills the junkie mold of classic Bright Lights Interpol--a welcomed revival after the wayward Antics.

On the whole, Our Love To Admire delivers exactly what's promised, which for fans will be exactly enough.

Our Love to Admire will be looked back on as that tricky third record, the one it's cool to like best.

Attention to the smallest instrumental details and the finest points of every composition have become Interpol trademarks; more complex than its pop song structures might suggest, Our Love To Admire is well worth exploring.

Somehow the band manages to sound insincere and gorgeous at the same time.

Falling somewhere between the full-on gloom of their debut and the peppier follow-up, Antics, this new disc may not be their Sgt. Pepper, but it’s still filled with morbidly catchy treats.

Our Love to Admire’s lesser tracks seem to have placed a greater emphasis on texture than melody or even rhythm, which is arguably the band’s most potent weapon. As a whole, though, Sam Fogarino will be satisfied.

If you're a hardcore Interpol fan, already accustomed to the gloomy, brooding aspects of the band's full-releases, I would strongly recommend Our Love to Admire as a solid release which easily competes with Antics. However, if you've only dabbled, this album isn't explosive enough to edge out many of the other recent releases in this genre.

Our Love To Admire isn't going to change many minds--those who already liked the band will find plenty to please, and vice versa. [Summer 2007, p.80]

The quality of the album isn't the issue, it's the qualities, the contradictions, the duplicity: it's what makes it as durable a listen as ever, but oddly empty when it comes to empathy.

On Our Love to Admire that world-weariness goes from strikingly haunting to fairly monotonous.

Interpol's third LP sounds more or less like the last two, and that's its biggest problem.

It feels like half of an album by a band making sure their songs that fit the mold of what they've done before, and half of an album by a band using their major-label leverage to push their boundaries.

When it works, it's undoubtedly impressive: impressive enough, in fact, to counter the fact that Interpol are pretty light on ideas of their own.

Admire feels oddly reined in, a transitional record by a band not yet willing to completely let go of the past.

Admire finds the band's balance shifting significantly; the rhythm players often seem more like glorified session men than integral components of a sleek post-punk machine.

Crucially, it seems their ability to write a magisterially moving song such as "NYC" or "Obstacle No 1", both from their debut, seems to have abandoned them. In fairness, sonically speaking, this is their best effort yet.

In fleshing out the contours of a sound once slavishly indebted to early-'80s titans like JD and the Smiths, they've nuanced the moods Banks moons over. Awesome for him. Only so-so for us. [August 2007, p.114]

Here's the solid, understated third album that digs in without trying to break new ground.

Even the best songs of Our Love To Admire can’t reach the boggling complexity and honesty of most anything from "Turn On The Bright Lights" (2002).

Our Love to Admire is the perfect soundtrack for an eighth grade dance, but for actual adults who know better, it’s best to avoid this mess.

The psych guitar closing "The Scale" and "Mammoth" work well, but Our Love to Admire could use more Carlos D.'s low-end bass/keyboard flourishes. Perhaps it's time to turn the lights out.

Our Love To Admire isn’t even a contractual obligation to push off without care. But boy does it sound like one; a band phoning it in, out of steam, and running on a few lingering fumes and smoldering coals.