Last year, however, Interpol made the transition from then-label Matador to a new major-label home at Capitol Records, indicating seemingly bigger and better things. With the release of Our Love to Admire, "bigger" is certainly the most apt descriptor to use. With a newly heavy reliance on synths and production aid courtesy of Rich Costey (Muse, Franz Ferdinand), Our Love to Admire is an ominous, gothic epic of an album. In other words, it's what you could only wish the Killers sounded like.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on first single "The Heinrich Maneuver," in which eerie synths squeal atop danceable rhythms while Paul Banks details a bitter goodbye to a California-bound lover. Likewise, lead-off track "Pioneer to the Falls" creeps funereally like a dense fog through a barren, war-torn landscape. While Interpol temporarily abandons its trademark atmospheric shoegazer-isms on riff-heavy stompers such as "All Fired Up" and "Mammoth" (the latter featuring a clanging bell that will bring a smile to any Iron Maiden fan), the band discovers a soulful strut on "Rest My Chemistry."

With the clever wordplay of titles such as "No I in Threesome" and "The Heinrich Maneuver," it would even seem that the group has finally allowed some humor into its work. Yet neither of these titles can shed the respective songs of their own seriousness, in particular, the former's theme of utilizing sexual experiments in order to save a relationship ("Alone we may fight / So let us be three tonight"). It's no brighter or more optimistic, but Our Love to Admire is by all means a step toward sonic lavishness. If Antics and Turn on the Bright Lights were the works that established these New Yorkers as cult heroes, this is their first blockbuster.

-Jeff Terich

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