The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com 9A - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 The Michigan Daily - michigandailycom 9A - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 GET LOW From Page 7A predictable sort of transformation. If the initial premise is to tell the back- story of this mysterious legend, it doesn't become clear until about halfway through the film. Everything hinges on the mys- tery of why the protagonist would choose to isolate himself for 40 years and then come back to throw his own funeral party. It is evident, through the fractured pieces of dialogue and engineered gruff- ness, "Get Low" is a poor man's attempt at Coen Brothers tragicomedy. Yet as the film sputters through its grim one-liners as if it were a protracted sketch on "Sat- urday Night Live," it stagnates. Not until a revealing dinner at Bush's cottage does the plot question finally become apparent, but at this point one hour into the film, the audience cannot bring itself to really care. From here, the buildup is antiseptic and the climax does not so much burn out as fizzle. The folk tale-redemption circuit is a storyline that is ripe to be explored, but cinematographer-turned-director Aaron Schneider ("Two Soldiers") simply does not have a strong enough grasp of the cam- era in order to make all the elements gel together. Yet Schneider faithfully main- tains a certain authenticity to the period film, liberally dusting its mule-drawn car- riages and storefront windows in sepia tones with 6lan, while twanging fiddle tunes scratch out melodies in the back- ground. But for all its adherence to the 1930s rural Tennessee atmosphere, "Get Low" cannot match its rather small char- acters to romp in the period playground he has provided for them. With a run-time far too long for its rath- er weak storyline, "Get Low" is not color- ful or caricatured enough to match up to the big expectations other tall-tale films have already reached - not complicated enough to become a star vehicle for Duvall and not interesting enough for the audi- ence to stay the entire way through. Interpol gets awkward Self-titled LP starts with a bang before fizzling into pseudo-balladry By JOSHUA BAYER Daily Arts Writer When a band releases a self-titled LP, it usually means one of two things: the record is either a debut (The Smiths, The *** Modern Lovers, Suede) or a brazen follow-up Interpol to an alleged master- work (Portishead after Interpol Dummy, Broken Social Matador Scene after You Forgot It In People, Liars after Drum's Not Dead, etc.). Interpol's Interpol is neither of these. But, tactically, it's easy to see why the band would decide to drop the eponym bomb at this point in time. Ever since Interpol debuted with the classic Turn on the Bright Lights in 2002, the group has been at the raw end of a struggle for artistic ingenuity. 2004's Antics, while an incredibly solid record, was essentially just a strip- ping-down and cleaning-up ofthe outfit's signature goth-grooving, with a shift in emphasis from hazy doomsday catharsis to lighter, mid-tempo riffing - a trick the band could only pull once. 2007's Our Love to Admire was the true red flag. The album's vapid attempt to recapture the emotional intensity of Bright Lights resulted in an incredibly mixed bag of hair-raising head-boppers ("The Heinrich Maneuver," "Mam- moth") and laughably contrived "men- ace" ("Pioneer To The Falls," "All Fired Up"). Interpol is Interpol's first true crack at legitimately retooling its sound instead of simply revamping it. Moreover, the album is the band's most serious sonic effort since its debut. While there are flashes of the shadowy riffing and groov- ing that define Interpol's aesthetic, the record is undeniably the band's most experimental outing to date, flaunting an otherworldly exoticness that was only hinted at superficially on Our Love to Admire. First, Interpol easily contains two contenders for strongest song of 2010. Album-opener "Success" and lead single "Barricade" are both tendon-tightening tours de force, coming the closest to the Interpol of yore without cashing in on In(terpolception. remixed nostalgia. Both tracks pump like well oiled pistons, building jaw- droppingly propulsive grooves out of spaced-out,-in-the-pocket instrumenta- tion, testifying to the fact that the band is at its finest when focusing on sinisterly funky drum-and-bass-and-double-gui- tar chemistry. While the rest of Interpol never really matches the grand-slam-ness of those two tracks, it packs a handful of similarly stellar growers. "Memory Serves" is like 'Success' and 'Barricade' are tendon-tightening tours de force. a sexy foray into a satanic strip club, con- stantly threatening to short-circuit on its tight, circular rhythms while stealthily building steam. And "Lights" could be the most intricate songthe band has ever recorded, starting out with little more than Paul Bank's funereal vocals and austere guitar churning and seamlessly evolving into a goliath of jagged arpeg- gios and open-hi-hat drum pummeling. Unfortunately, all of the aforemen- tioned songs fall on the first half of the album. After "Barricade," Interpol slumps into a murky sludge of pseudo- balladry that continues the album's vein ofunbridled darkness andsonicmystique but failsto balance it out with instrumen- tal dynamism or pop sensibility. "Try It On" mashes together Andrew Bird-style whistling with glitchy stutter- synths and a tense, wintry piano loop that feels straight out of a dog sledding documentary, epitomizing the album's penchant for bizarre juxtapositions that don't quite click. The song - and much of the album's second half - is all pile-up without any of the band's traditional gut- punchy acrobatics, sounding like it could have been assembled from loops. By the time Banks is mariachi-ing in Spanish over a bit-crushed drumbeat and retro, horn-style synths on closer "The Undo- ing," the term "shock value" has effec- tively lost all of its meaning. Ironically, on Interpol, the band's weirdness quotient is almost in direct proportion to its drabness quotient. While the album's latter half is chock- full of on-paper experimentation, it comes across as a mopey skip-a-thon of all gloom and no bite; the drumming is either canned or nonexistent and the basslines do little more than keep time and underline Bank's vocals - a virtual crime, considering Interpol has one of the juiciest rhythm sections in indie rock today. One can only hope that Interpol is more of an awkward transition album and less of a dead end. "Is Bill Murray gonna have to chokabitch?"