Interpol’s opening acts, Liars and Cat Power, were openly delighted to be playing Madison Square Garden on Friday night, a big place for bands on the indie-rock circuit. Interpol itself kept its cool, even as it was headlining the top arena in its hometown. Eventually, the singer Paul Banks allowed that it was “a very special night for us.” In Interpol’s songs, emotion is measured and constrained, and anything like triumph or elation would upset the band’s neat balance of ache and mathematics.
When Interpol got started, in the late 1990’s, it seemed thoroughly retro, out to reclaim a certain niche of post-punk. Interpol’s steadily ticking eighth-note patterns on guitars and bass, its unwavering drumbeats and Paul Banks’s morosely aggrieved voice all hark directly back to the mope-rock of Joy Division. Now, with bands like Editors, the National and Cinematics latching on to kindred late-1970’s styles, Interpol sounds less like a throwback and more like the beginning of a revival.
But Interpol didn’t follow Joy Division to its morbid, revelatory extremes. Interpol’s members wear natty suits onstage, and its lyrics are more likely to revolve around loneliness and romance gone wrong than about desolation and overwhelming dread.
Interpol stays determinedly glum and portentous. It’s easy to understand why the narrator has so much trouble holding on to a lover. Luckily Interpol’s music has pop instincts. Drones give way to melodic choruses, crescendos surge and new material often appears well into a song. At the Garden the unfolding structures expressed more than lyrics like, “Can’t you see what you’ve done to my heart and soul?/This is a wasteland now.”
The band started its set playing behind a scrim, with oversize shadows projected on white fabric, and then had brief technical trouble getting the scrim removed. But even with the fabric out of the way, Interpol stayed remote: better at displaying formal elegance than showing much heart. Near the end of the concert the band got around to playing “NYC,” which announces, “I know you’ve supported me a long time/Somehow I’m not impressed.”
Chan Marshall, who performs as Cat Power, sang a skittish set. Her current band leans toward bluesy 1960’s rock, and she led it mostly in radically shifted cover versions, like a version of “New York, New York” that turned it into a minor-key blues and an upbeat, Rolling Stones-style remake of “Tracks of My Tears.” Ms. Marshall spent much of the set dodging the spotlight, heading for dark parts of the stage, while teasing at the songs with what her husky, melting voice could do if she weren’t so perversely diffident.
Liars decided to work the Garden stage like rock stars. Their songs are pounding art-rock drones that are fearlessly abrasive on albums. But with the lead singer, Angus Andrew, strutting and gesticulating in a white suit and a big, relentless beat, Liars sounded at home as arena-rock.
