Tag: The National

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Best albums of 2007: #4 The National “Boxer”

I’m starting to feel like a broken record now. I’m certainly noticing a trend and thinking that 2007 must’ve been quite the year of musical discovery for me. Because just like “The Besnard Lakes are the dark horse” at #10, Okkervil River’s “The stage names” at #9, and Blonde Redhead’s “23” at #5, “The boxer” at #4 was my introduction to The National, a band finding its feet and releasing a touchstone of an album.

I remember listening to it all the time in 2007. I liked it so much that I went through the trouble to run a cord from my laptop to my old stereo in order to make a copy of the MP3 version of the album on my computer to cassette tape. Yes, I know. The idea seems technologically backwards but my old cavalier didn’t have a CD player or an auxiliary input so the cassette player was the only alternative to commercial radio. It’s an album I listened to all the time in the car in this way and got to know every song intimately. Much later on, it was among the first albums I searched out for my vinyl shelves when I started collecting records again, another step backwards technologically but this step in a cooler set of sneakers.

“The boxer” is the fourth album by the Cincinnati-based five piece and their second on Beggars banquet. Like its predecessor “Alligator” and all the albums that followed, it received near unanimous critical acclaim and appeared on countless year end lists. Their sound appealed to me upon first listen, angular rock that was warm and atmospheric but held a constant threat of danger and darkness. All of their tunes are remarkable for the whiskey smooth baritone of frontman Matt Berninger and for his intelligent use of imagery and a stream of consciousness style of lyrics.

So many great tracks on “Boxer”, it was hard to pick just three tunes for you but here is what I got.

“Ada”: Let me start off by saying that I haven’t done any reading up on and really don’t know for sure what the literal meanings are behind any of these songs but the lyrics are written so that there is so much open for interpretation and it’s fun to conjecture. In the case of “Ada”, I imagine her to be a woman struggling with a psychological disorder, the smattering of keys, seemingly plucked at random reflecting her thought process. Berninger sings to her soothingly, wishing to calm her, willing her to come through on the right side of sanity. “Ada, Ada, Ada, Ada, Ada, I can hear the sound of your laugh through the wall. Ada, Ada, Ada, Ada, Ada, I’ve been hoping you know your way ’round.” The strings right at the end are so uplifting, you think that she just might.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aV0Ka-SSEU

“Fake empire”: “Fake empire” is the opening number and starts off calmly enough with a rumbling on the piano but builds and builds to an ecstatic crescendo complete with massive horns. Berninger is talking smack about how we’re all sleep walking through life, making apple pies and drinking spiked lemonade while there is grime and pain creeping in just around the edges of our idyllic photo. But he does none of this angrily or sermon on the mount like, it is all conversational and matter of fact, like he knows we’re all in on it. So optimistic of him.

“Mistaken for strangers”: “Oh, you wouldn’t want an angel watching over, surprise, surprise, they wouldn’t wanna watch another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults.” Pure awesome. Like the song itself, a paean to the anonymity of life in the big mean world. The idea of being “mistaken for strangers by your own friends” reminds me of the incredible urge I get sometimes to turn away or duck into a doorway when I see someone I know in the street. The drumming is aggressive in your face and the heavy bass is not far behind. This is an example of where The National gets its post-punk tag, on songs like this where the instrumentation is as claustrophobic as Berninger lyrics suggest we all feel. This is probably one of my favourite of all their tunes. So, so, so good.

For the rest of the albums in this list, check out my Best Albums page here.

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Albums

Best albums of 2017: #3 The National “Sleep well beast”

Four years! I repeat. Four years!

It may not seem like a long time in the grand scheme of things but in this age of musical mass consumption and disposal, it feels almost the equivalent of a decade or more. And that’s how long we’ve had to wait since the last The National record for new material. It was interminable. Bordering on indefinite hiatus. Luckily for us, they made our wait worth the while.

I got into The National with 2007’s “The boxer” and to my ears, the Cincinnati five-piece have, with each successive album, built upon their last, creating new worlds with their music while remaining recognizable and true to their sound. And with “Sleep well beast”, now their seventh record and third since “The boxer”, the critics are falling over themselves yet again with how experimental this record is and how the band has reinvented themselves… again.

I’m not sure about the reinvention bit but it is a fantastic record. It is dark and ambient and rich with layers of sound and Matt Berninger’s baritone. It was this last that was the cause for many early comparisons to Joy Division but I don’t think that anyone would go there now. This music is warmer and livelier, despite its inherent sombre tone, not at all like the claustrophobia imbued in early post-punk. “Sleep well beast” is an album for noise cancelling ear phones set at high volume, like much of The National’s work, and it’s also the sound of the band pushing themselves to the limits on every track.

Okay. Enough of my fan boy blatherings. Have a listen to my three picks for you and let me know what you think.

“Carin at the liquor store”: The piano work at the beginning suggests a conversation walked in upon halfway through, a song that has always been there but only just discovered now. The reverb melts in at some point in the song, putting Berninger out on some higher plane, while he sings about his wife, Carin, and finding the body of a long dead writer in the same breath. A love song unlike one I’ve ever heard. And yet, oh so beautiful.

“The system only dreams in total darkness”:  Maybe it’s the title or maybe the lyrical themes but this tune feels like Pink Floyd at the height of their powers, listening to it, though, you might call me crazy. It’s got a jaunty beat, Matt Berninger’s rich vocals, and is nowhere near as long a tune as Floyd would have it. Still, “The system” is a dark machine with plenty of intricate inner workings that make it go and only become apparent with close observation. Great pop song too.

“Day I die”:  Track two is killer. A manic beat and an ecstatic guitar scream that pushes things even further and faster than I’m sure they are meant to be. The vocals, too, are in a rush, as if Berninger has to get the message across in the limited time he has. But this is a National song, so the message is somewhat blurred by the imagery and the stream of consciousness delivery. If I had to guess, though, I’d say it has more to do with living than dying, and living without hesitation or regret. So don’t delay, get up and dance with The National. You won’t regret it.

For the rest of the albums in this list, check out my Best Albums page here.

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Tunes

Best tunes of 2010: #22 The National “Conversation 16”

<< #23    |    #21 >>

Have you ever been sitting alone in a crowded cafe or pub and purposefully listened to people talk, catching snippets of conversations from the tables all around you?

Of course, you have. We all have.

In fact, one of my writing professors in university assigned this very task to us in my second year prose workshop as homework. We were to fill a page with real dialogue and bring it to class to discuss, not as a means to reveal the darkest secrets of strangers, but to get a feeling for how people really talk. As we all discovered (perhaps unsurprisingly), we don’t talk how we write. Phrases are rarely in complete sentences, plenty of “ums” and “ers”, and certain words used way too frequently, like “like” and a particular four letter word that starts with the letter “f”. Many of these pages of dialogue that we read out in class were hilarious and disjointed, especially since they were, in many cases, culled from multiple conversations occurring simultaneously.

Now, it could be the song’s title, but it’s this very exercise I think of whenever I listen to The National’s “Conversation 16” with its scratching, reverberating guitars and ominous drumming. I’ve heard that Matt Berninger has said that he just lets the lyrics come to him as he listens to the instrumentation that the Dessner brothers create. In this way, the words are more for the imagery and the sounds, rather than any deep meaning. However, his conversational tone and the banal yet very disjointed phrasing on this track has me hearing it as snippets of conversations from all around me, cutting through the ethereal and dream-like haze of the music.

And speaking of disjointed, have you ever watched the video for this tune? It features Kristen Schaal (“The flight of the conchords”) as the US president and John Slattery (“Mad men”) as a secret service man that fantasizes about more than just guarding her body. She seems to be quite bored with her post as the most powerful person in the world until she receives a flirtatious invite to Russia by that country’s president. The video is a bit bizarre on the whole and not a little bit funny but it nicely puts a light spin on a song that features the lyrics “I was afraid I’d eat your brains, ’cause I’m evil”.

All of this adds up to the brilliance that has won The National a sizeable following. And if you’re not one of them yet, give this tune a spin and you might find yourself on the path to joining the club.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2010 list, click here.