Set Black Fires

Interpol “Mammoth”

The sections of “Mammoth” sound as though they’re being played out of order, as though all the standard parts of a rock song – verses, choruses, refrains, instrumental breaks – were shuffled around in a bag and then tossed out, with the parts played in the order that they hit the floor. But despite the scrambled feeling, there’s an internal logic here and it’s all based on momentum. The song bursts forward at top speed from the start before seeming to crash into a wall, then stumble around in a daze, and then go back into a full sprint. The music feels drunk and belligerent, forceful and unrelenting. It seems lacking in grace, but only a band with a strong command of their own dynamics could pull this off without it sounding like a mess.

Paul Banks always sounds cranky and surly to some extent but on “Mammoth” he sounds incredibly peevish, which is kind of a funny thing to express in music. He doesn’t come across as angry, just very impatient and annoyed and aggrieved as he whines “spare me the suspense” or spits out the line “enough with this fucking incense.” He sounds like a goth dandy throwing a fit, and it’s hard to get a sense of the actual scale of his negative feelings here.

“Mammoth” is a very pure example of Banks’ lyrical aesthetics in that you get emotionally charged lines without any sense of context contrasted with weirdly specific lines that will make you wonder “…why would anyone sing that??” In this case you get the seemingly disconnected aside “there are seven ancient pawn shops along the road / and I know seven aching daddies you may want to know,” sung in a softer tone of voice in the delirious post-wall-crash refrains. It’s hard to piece together any kind of narrative here but the way the bits and pieces of this song do and do not click together seems to be the larger point of the piece, like it’s meant to be this thing that confounds your mind while compelling your body to move. You know you’re not supposed to know about the aching daddies, but you’re always going to want to try to figure it out anyway.

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