THE NATIONAL

UNDERGROUND OVERACHIEVERS

The National deliver another epically melancholy album of uneasy anthems 

 

by Matt Ashare |  
Published May 22, 2013

There's something charmingly improbable about the enduring rise of the National, the five-piece, Brooklyn-based indie-rock band whose rather eagerly anticipated sixth album in a dozen years comes out this week. For starters, the group continues to boast not just one but two pairs of brothers: guitarists Bryce and Aaron Dressler, who also happen to be twins, and bassist Scott and drummer Bryan Devendorf. And this, in a pursuit in which familial bonds have somewhat notoriously generated more strife than harmony — from Don and Phil Everly's legendary feuds in the ’70s, to the bickering between Ray and Dave Davies that's kept the Kinks from reuniting for 15-plus, to the more recent acrimony that led to a terminal split between Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis.
    Apparently, the family that plays together doesn't always stay together. Perhaps the National are simply an exception that proves the rule. In any case, the Dresslers and Devendorfs, along with singer Matt Berninger, arrived in Brooklyn via Cincinnati, Ohio in the late-’90s, when the borough was well on its way to becoming a nexus for hipsterdom second only to Oregon's mythical Portlandia. As the story goes, Berninger and Scott Devendorf had previously played together in college, going all the way back to 1991. Likewise, the band's other three principals had collaborated in various configurations prior to the move. Of course, none of that would be of particular import or interest if, in hindsight, it didn't seem somewhat obvious that together they'd possessed the components of what would become the National all along. If nothing else, it does lend a mystic aura of fate or inevitability to what might otherwise be a familiar indie-rock saga, that of yet another idiosyncratically self-styled 21st-century band gradually emerging from the underground to great acclaim a la the Arcade Fire or the Decemberists.
    It's admittedly a bit too soon to predict with any degree of accuracy whether or not the National's epically wrought new "Trouble Will Find Me" will amount to a "Suburbs"-style breakthrough, or deliver the kind of commercial vindication that the Decemberists achieved two years ago with "The King Is Dead." But, it does fit the general profile of an album that confidently harnesses a certain intangible yet ineluctable momentum, and it does feel like it's arrived at the right time for the band to capitalize on the investment they've made in shoring up a solidly fervent core audience, while broadening their base through large festival appearances and some smart marketing that's seen their songs included in "Game of Thrones," "Boardwalk Empire," and at least a half dozen other respected television dramas. In it's own way, "Trouble Will Find Me" is also a fine example of an album that sticks to a familiar, if somewhat challenging script without resorting to the merely formulaic, or making unnecessarily awkward concessions in the interests of accessibility.
    The National's early steps may have been in the general direction of a kind of airily austere Americana, with tastefully rendered guitars, anchored by Berninger's baleful baritone, his quixotically confessional lyrics, and a remarkably muscular rhythm section. But, the band gradually grew out of countrified comforts and into a more expansive, textural space, where churning distortion and hints of abstract discord readily and alternately give way to ambient orchestral interludes, spare yet never quite skeletal soundscapes, and richly layered minor-key melodies. It a darkly seductive space that's particularly well suited to Berninger's tenderly stoic, world-weary delivery, a version of the debauched lounge singer's sentimental croon filtered through post-punk's knowing insouciance. Berninger is a pro when it comes to wearing his crushed heart on his dapper sleeve, and he's got a flair for melodrama. But, his performative despair is tempered by a wry undercurrent of black comedy. "I was afraid I'd eat your brains," he sings in the refrain from the 2011 anti-anthem "Conversation 16," "’Cause, I'm evil. . ."
    In that sense, he's tended to remind me of Brit-pop singer Morrissey, particularly when his misery-loves-company declarations push on toward the absurd. "I can't fight it anymore, I'm going through an awkward phase," he offhandedly confesses on "Demons," one of several deliberately paced plaintive rockers on "Trouble Will Find Me" that has an oddly jarring, off-balance time signature. And then he understatedly drops this zinger: "I'm am secretly in love with everyone that I grew up with," as if that were somehow at the root of his troubles. In the more straightforwardly poppy "Don't Swallow the Cap," he's carried breezily along on a brisk backbeat as he takes stock of his various inadequacies, "I'm tired, I'm freezing, I'm dumb/When it gets so late, I forget everyone," culminating in this admission: "I have only two emotions/Careful fear and dead devotion/I can't get the balance right/Throw my marbles into the fight."
    In the same song he references two classic albums from the alt-rock canon, Nirvana's "Nevermind" and the Replacements' "Let It Be" Yes, the Beatles also had a "Let It Be," but I'm fairly that's not the one he means, because there are many ways in which the National, for all their presumptive hipster trappings, are comfortably uncomfortable outsider survivors of the same suffocating psychic space that a messed-up Minnesotan like Paul Westerberg came out of, and that Aberdeen's Kurt Cobain never quite escaped. It can be a treacherous legacy. But the National have a way of taking it in stride, of finding a kind of transcendence or liberation in articulating the neuroses — the awkwardness that Berninger attributes to a "phase" in "Demons" — that come with existing somewhere in between the underground and the mainstream. Cast in that light, the crushing chorus of "Demons" — "I stay down. . . With my demons" — comes across more like a defiant statement of purpose than an admission of defeat. It sounds good either way.