Well, this is the last Interpol song that’s gonna be on here. A real shame, to be sure. Some of you may click on the ‘Interpol’ tag at the end of blog, witness the others posts about the band I’ve written on here and come to a conclusion that I might be quite the basic fan of them because they’re all singles. And I wouldn’t argue with you. But I’ve listened through at least five Interpol albums. The band’s first three are the best ones, and the singles are almost usually the best numbers on them. At least to me. And then bassist Carlos Dengler left after the fourth one, and it hasn’t been the same since.

But when the songs are good, they’re very, very good, and this can be said for today’s featured number ‘Slow Hands’ – the first single from Interpol’s Antics, released in 2004. It may have very well be the first Interpol song I’d ever heard too, again, thanks to the good people who were working at MTV2 back in the day. I want to say I may have saw the video a couple times initially, a few months passed, and then for some reason the video started showing quite regularly. That reason turned out to be that the song was being released as a single again over in the UK. It got to a lower position than the first time.

The old family CRT-TV had this thing where the right speaker played much more loudly than the left. And from listening to Antics, I know the interplay between Daniel Kessler and Paul Banks’s guitars are usually the main focus. So I missed out on that for a while. But even hearing the right side, featuring Kessler’s guitar part, it didn’t stop the song from sounding as good as it did. ‘Slow Hands’, I think, is a song about love and all the aspects of it. Falling into it, not trying hard enough to find it, being heartbroken after rejection. I put an emphasis on ‘I think’ because Paul Banks’s lyrics are written in a way that really doesn’t make the subject matter obvious in any kind of fashion, yet they still possess a poetic quality to them. Banks sounds fantastic behind the microphone here too. He does throughout the whole album. The comparisons to Ian Curtis of Joy Division was a huge thing for a while. The reference to a song of that band here may be a joking nod to them. But there’s a particular tone to them on this track that have always been captivating since that first time I heard it.