Album reviews: White Denim – Performance; Interpol – Marauder

Two bands reckon with a musical legacy that stretches over the last decade

Interpol (James Medina)

White Denim, Performance

★★★★☆

When White Denim arrived 10 years ago to critical fanfare for their exhilarating live shows, the Texan band’s then-drummer described their complex sound as “grog rock”. But there were plenty more influences within their unusual melding of 1970s prog and garage-rock: into the mix they threw energetic acid-punk and math-rock.

Eight albums in, and some of that edgy math-rock experimentalism has been lost, along with two original members of Leon Bridges’ band. But what they now lack in raw, ferocious edginess, they make up for with one glorious driving riff after another on Performance.

White Denim (Pooneh Ghana)

The triumphant brass of opening lead single “Magazin” sets the tone on an upbeat album that hurtles through its nine major-key numbers in just over 30 minutes. An exuberant synth riff on “Back Seat Driver” provides one of their most earworm melodies to date, James Petralli’s vocals shifting from mellow to impassioned howl.

White Denim’s website claims that they’ve “carefully and continuously studied the greatest records ever made”, and “It Might Get Dark” shines with Rolling Stones-esque blues-rock.

Not that their shifting time signatures are a thing of the past. The proggy “Sky Beaming” is packed with evolving rhythms. Performing such complex patterns in unison (guitar, bass, keys and drums all at once) – before breaking into shimmering guitars – shows off their virtuoso musicianship on this hugely enjoyable album. Elisa Bray

Interpol, Marauder

★★★★☆

It’s 16 years since Interpol first emerged from the same New York post-punk cauldron as Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Strokes. When bassist and founding member Carlos Dengler left the band in 2010, critics feared the departure would derail them.

In fact, their sixth album, Marauder, is their most experimental to date, blending everything from rough garage rock to Motown rhythms. They’re reinvigorated, brimming with energy and self-assurance.

Using an outside producer for the first time since 2007’s Our Love to Admire – David Fridmann (Mogwai, The Flaming Lips) – the band have finally rid themselves of the Joy Division comparisons that have always followed them around. Indeed, beneath the band’s typically cool performance style, there’s now warmth and lightness, as well as shifting tempos that keep the listener on their toes.

Lead single “The Rover” follows a charismatic cult leader wandering a strange landscape brought to life by guitarist Daniel Kessler. His urgent, feral guitar hook races with Sam Fogarino’s frenetic-sounding drum beat, which features complex, infuriatingly subtle rhythms on the hi-hat.

All the while, Banks sings about how “The Rover” lures his followers seductively: “Come and see me, yeah baby, let’s cry/ Satin face in some worlds we’d be too kind/ Nature’s subject to fires again/Falling for my independence.”

Banks has suggested in recent interviews that the eponymous Marauder is actually himself: a person who in certain scenarios needs to unleash a creative kind of chaos.

He appears most obviously on “Stay In Touch”, which opens with a buoyant, Americana-influenced twang from Kessler’s Epiphone Casino and precedes Banks’s menacing lyrics about an uncomfortable intimacy. “Marauder breaks bonds/ Marauder stays long/ Plays with the real face on,” he threatens/promises.

Those charismatic figures who lurk beneath the surface of the record are intriguing enough to keep you coming back for more. Roisin O’Connor