A Crimson Grail (for 2 electric guitars).

I've still not made up my mind about the new Interpol record, which has me simultaneously battling an impulse to unconditionally love it and a desire to take the easy "they've lost it" route. It's hard to listen to your favourite bands with ears clean of past brilliance. Perhaps it's just a bit middling. It certainly contains some of their worst work in the noisily bland "Mammoth", and opener "Pioneer To The Falls" which is much, much less than the fleshier progression from "Untitled" that it aspires to be.

Yet there are things I like about it, like the bilious, nasty chrous line from "The Heinrich Manouever", and things I love, in particular "Who Do You Think?", with its elliptically rendered lover's tiff set to a sashaying backbeat that shakes off the cloying grey that clouds some of the album. And while some have groaned at Paul Banks's lyrics on this record, including me, sometimes they can be really evocative. You could argue that some of his deliberately poetic moments verge on facile; I happen to really like their honest reach towards beauty, images such as "the coast of hypnotic" and "follow the speed in the star-swept night". He also makes some nice puns, like "I only call them when I know I don't see them", the classic phrase retooled to soothe a jealous, paranoid girlfriend.

But where I think he really succeeds is at expressing the hopelessness of mechanically rebuilding love. In "No I In Threesome", for example, he declares romantic banalities by rote - "through the storms and the light / baby you stood by my side", "I see your lips are on fire" - before invoking the clichéd, euphemistic entreaty "Babe, it's time we gave something new a try". Rather than this being parodic or po-faced, it occupies a space between the two. He takes the inadequacy of American relationship vocabulary, all embarrasingly bald emotion and unsexy practicality, and wears it with a wry, defeated smile.

Anyway, what struck me originally about the album before I got to intellectualising it was the similarity of closing track "The Lighthouse" to "A Crimson Grail" by Rhys Chatham. (Chatham's work is subtitled "for 400 electric guitars"; Chatham recruited 400 axemen to perform it in and around the Sacre-Coeur in Paris - heavy). "The Lighthouse" creates a shifting, tidal guitar sound through some freely strummed chords before some symphonic low end kicks in; "The Crimson Grail" does the same but dispenses with the "kicking in" part in favour of constantly ebbing religious might.

I think that considering Carlos D's new-found affinity with classical music, "A Crimson Grail" may well have proved the ultimate rock band-to-philharmonic gateway drug. Spot the difference:

Interpol - The Lighthouse

Rhys Chatham - A Crimson Grail (For 400 Electric Guitars) - Part One

Be patient with the Chatham to download, it is 20 minutes and 43 seconds long).