Antics

Often, backward-looking pop is dull, leaving the educated listener with the feeling that rather than listen to the new imitator, they're better off going back to the source.

Who in their right mind would listen to Green Day when they can just put on London calling or Inflammable material? The latter had the great advantage of feeling it, not doing it because it sells to America's teen CD buyers.

I feel this doubly so when the bands ripped off were useless to start with. I mean, we didn't need the Slits, so why do we need the new Slits?

Yeah, but. All great bands have influences. All look back to the past. Yes, they do, but they take the raw material and forge something new and thrilling from it. The Stone Roses took the lead of late sixties' garage bands and workaday psychedelica and made, well, sugar-spun magic. Very little great is entirely new. It's the context that allows us to get a grip on it. Innovation needs the old as a springboard.

So that brings me to Interpol. They are supposed to be Joy Division copyists. I'm not sure that whoever decided that ever heard any Joy Division, because I can't hear it. Yes, both made lean, limber guitar music and wrote songs that tended to mopery, but that's it. Joy Division were heavy rock, the Stooges dialled down from a bludgeon to a rapier; Interpol are Television with more attitude, Wire with girlfriend problems.

Their second album has been hailed as a great departure from Turn on the bright lights. I can't hear that either. It sounds like more of the same, except with a little more warmth, a little more depth. It occasionally threatens to shake a tailfeather (but this is very much a white boy's idea of funky).

Yes, I suppose they could have made a similar album in 1982. It's only the production that is new. It's remarkably uninformed by music in the intervening twenty or so years. But the gentle swing of Public pervert and the sweetness of No exit will keep me coming back to Antics. So, yes, it's a new wave album that is a quarter of a century too late, but it's a good one, which I would have loved then and would still be loving today.

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:24 pm