Album Review: The National - Boxer

[Beggar's Banquet, 2007]

In 2005, the National quit their day jobs as city bankers in New York and dedicated themselves to the recording of their third album, Alligator. Although generally received well, it was not heralded by the critics or the public as an instant classic. The album gradually built up a massive listenership, and found its way onto many critics’ end-of-year favourite lists. It was a difficult album to get in to, but once you managed it, it was a difficult album not to love, synonymous with the term ‘grower’. The literate, melancholy lyrics, sung by vocalist Matt Berninger in a rich voice sounding like a cheekier version of Leonard Cohen, as well as the incredibly musical drumming of Bryan Devendorf, made Boxer one of the most eagerly awaited albums of the year. With it, they have further honed and controlled what made Alligator so great and produced an album that has both the intensity and depth of their last album and also a more accessible, tuneful sheen.

There are so many things I love about this album. Many of Berninger’s dryly comic vocals, such as  ‘Fifteen blue shirts and womanly hands/ You’re shooting up the ladder’, from Racing Like A Pro, and ‘You get mistaken for strangers by your own friends/ When you pass them at night under the silvery, silvery Citibank lights’, from single Mistaken For Strangers, reference his previous life as a white-collar worker. His satirical edge is also turned to the current political situation, with songs such as Fake Empire perfectly capturing his sense of dissatisfaction with America’s relationship with the rest of the world. Despite this, Boxer is an intensely personal album, with lines such as ‘You know I dreamt about you for 29 years before I saw you’, from the magnificent album centrepiece Slow Show, coming across as genuinely romantic and winning over even the most hardened cynics. Indeed, this blog's name comes from the lyrics to this, andI would say that Slow Show is probably my favourite song of recent times.

The music is somehow both epic and intimate, fitting Berninger’s vocals perfectly. As on Alligator, Bryan Devendorf’s drumming is a key part of this. The intricate, delicate rhythms of his drum kit somehow manage to sound like the main melody, backed by the interlocking guitars of the Dessner brothers. This all builds up into a warm, angry glow, which gradually dissipates during the more stripped-down last couple of tracks, a much more satisfying and complete ending than just gradually building up to an explosion of anger, as they did on Alligator.

All these elements go some way to describing how truly exceptional Boxer is, but the real glory is that all these different aspects of the music blend into each other, creating a seamless album that encapsulates the band’s insecurity, be it with the modern world or their own personal lives. Boxer is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the my favourite albums of the 2000s so far, and therefore an excellent way to kick this blog off.

Here's a link to the video for the single Slow Show.