Interpol
Hordern Pavilion
Thursday, February 21

With each of Interpol’s successive records having grown in scope, so too have the venues they play when touring Australia. From the Metro, to the Enmore, to here: the hulking, impersonal dead space of the Hordern Pavilion. It’s a tall order, even for the most dynamic of outfits.

With Our Love To Admire Interpol firmly stamped their intentions to expand both their sound and their audience, something which they have achieved to mixed reaction. They addressed the sticky issue of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ with a record that didn’t stray too far from a winning formula on the one hand, while showing more depth and a willingness to experiment, albeit only slightly, on the other. It didn’t set the world on fire in quite the way they might have hoped, infact, most people were underwhelmed (Pitchfork, Rolling Stone).

There is something of the deeply claustrophobic about Interpol’s music, it’s more conducive to stalking around city streets, earphones jammed in with the volume cranked – or moodily stewing over your most recent break-up, Scotch in hand – than it is to the communal catharsis of seeing it live. Only because Interpol live never really reaches the point of the communal when the band can’t quite let go of their New York cool and bridge the gap between band and audience.

If it weren’t for diminutive guitarist Daniel Kessler and his propensity to go apeshit – throwing all manner of terrific guitar hero shapes, Interpol would barely have a stage show at all. Paul Banks utters barely a word throughout the night, and the lighting leaves the band as silhouettes for most of the show. Live Interpol are now joined by a keyboardist to fill out the layerings of the record, who sits in the darkened wings of the stage without acknowledgement. The sound however, was magnificent, proving again that it can be done and that deafening levels of feedback are not a Hordern given.

The overall feeling is of something of a disconnect – the band feel very, very far from the audience – and the applause, though sometimes reaching fevered, is strangely subdued, almost reverent. It’s as if noone wants to risk letting it all hang out in their reverie, you’ve got to keep your hat at its ever so slightly right angle. Is this really rock and roll? It seems to imply so many rules about what’s hip to really be so.

The biggest reactions are reserved without surprise, for the material from Turn On The Bright Lights, a record that struck such a life altering chord with everyone who bought it. The encore consists almost exclusively of these songs, so well loved. I remember seeing Interpol tour that record at the Metro, and their show worked perfectly in a club. Which is the problem in a nutshell, they’re still playing that same club show, only on a massive stage. They haven’t quite mastered the art of communicating on that scale. If they ever do stop worrying so much about looking cool, they’ll be well on the way to filling the shoes of the bands they so clearly aspire to.