Song Of The Day 27/01/2013: The National - Exile Vilify

The National are definitely my favourite band, and have been for a number of years. I try and refrain from getting too fanboy-ish on here, but they've just announced the upcoming release of a new record, their first since 2010's brilliant-but-not-quite-as-good-as-Boxer 'High Violet', and that seems like a pretty good excuse to post a song of theirs. I was at ATP in Camber Sands in December when they previewed a few new songs from the record, and from what I can tell it'll have more of the slow, sombre stuff (check out 'I Need My Girl', which has been doing the rounds for a while) than the last record. Now all they need to do is throw in a few shouty Abel- or Available-type songs and it'll be a return to what they do best.

This song, from the Portal 2 soundtrack, is a fairly simple piano ballad that the band released as half of a double A side in 2011. It's not all that typical a National song in general, but the vocals and lyrics are quintessential Berninger.

The National release bizarre new video

The last few videos by the National have seemed to try and portray a more playful side to the band, at odds with their fairly morose public image (although in my opinion it is the wit and light-heartedness in the lyrics that makes them the band they are). The last video, for 'Terrible Love', was essentially just various shots of them having fun. Here, they have gone for a more storytelling approach, enlisting John Slattery (better known as the 'Stirling' of Stirling Cooper Draper Pryce) and Kristen Schaal (Mel from Flight Of The Conchords) to tell the story of forbidden love between the President of the USA and one of her bodyguards. Unfortunately for Slattery, Schaal (as the President) visits some Eastern European country and falls for the head of state there after watching him fight a man dressed as a bear. I'm guessing this is a parody of Putin's barechested hunting heroics, but I'd like to think the odds on Obama doing the same thing must be pretty long.

The National

Song Of The Day 13/02/2011: The National - Lucky You

The National only really started being talked about on the international scene in the wake of their critically-lauded third album, Alligator, and since then have progressed even further, culminating (in the UK, at least) in 3 quickly sold-out dates at the massive Brixton Academy (one of which I attended). But back when they were still just bankers in New York releasing tehir own records, they put out some astonishing stuff. Their first album has flashes of brilliance (such as '29 Years', the song that later morphed into 'Slow Show' from Boxer), but was slightly undermined by the feeling the band wasn't taking itself that seriously. Their second record, 'Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers', didn't suffer at all from that - it's hard to imagine a more serious-sounding song than the opener 'Cardinal Song', with it's refrain 'Never tell the one you want that you do; save it for the deathbed, when you know you kept her wanting you'. I absolutely love the whole album, which showcases some of the things the National used to be really good at before their sound got a bit homogenised on the last album or two - it has probably my favourite 'shouty' National song, Available, and closes with one of my favourite slow introspective songs from any artist, Lucky You.

Basically a piano-led ballad about the fall-out of a breakup, there really is a lot crammed into this fairly stark, basic song. It seems to me to be addressed to a girl that the singer has broken up with - the girl has moved on, and Berninger hasn't, despite trying. Lines like 'You're too smart to remember' and the title sound incredibly sarcastic in Berninger's trademark baritone drawl. There's a darker side too, with the first verse seeming to be set right after the breakup - Berninger sounds like a fairly standard stalker in this. The song progresses, however, right through to the last verse, where Berninger has possibly mellowed, despite his obviously intense remaining feelings, to a place which is much more emotionally stable, albeit much sadder. The lines 'You clean yourself to meet the man who isn't me, you're putting on a shirt - a shirt I'll never see' offer some kind of recovery, while admitting that recovery is a long way off.

The recording I've given below is the one from the Daytrotter Session they did back in 2007. The whole thing is worth listening to, and the version of 'Slow Show' is excellent. I've chosen this over the album version because I think it's slightly cleaner and more intimate, and works better as a stand-alone track than the album version.

The National - Lucky You

My Albums of 2010, Part 2 (5-1)

Here's the second part of my 2010 rundown, slightly later than originally promised.

	5 - Best Coast - Crazy For You Definitely the most divisive album of the year. I come down solidly in the 'pro-' camp, though. It's neither clever - I lost count of the times she uses the same 'lazy-crazy' rhyme over the first half of the record - nor new, and it's potentially very annoying (especially the lead single, 'Boyfriend', as my housemates can attest). I just love it. There are few genres that can get under my skin more than this kind of summery fuzz-pop. Bethany Cosentino, who formed this band (it was rumoured, with her ex-babysitter) after leaving Pocahaunted, is scarily obsessed with the subject of these songs, enough for some lyrics to send a shiver down the spine, but instead of being a bad thing, this gives the whole album a cohesiveness which means it works well as a full album, something frequently lost in this mp3 age, and especially rare in throwaway pop like this. Not every album needs to be a challenging listen, and some of this album is just brilliant.
	4 - The Tallest Man On Earth - The Wild Hunt There are obvious easy comparisons with 3rd-album-era Dylan, but in my mind this stretches no further than the fact that a guy with a fairly nasal voice has made a folk album good enough and accessible enough to be taken on and lauded by the wider music community. He's a lot more like Nick Drake, to my ears. The guitar-work especially is a lot more intricate than Dylan ever managed in his pre-electric days, and despite the lyrics being fairly obvious ('I plan to be forgotten when I'm gone', etc.), they are undeniably heartfelt and effective. This album, his second, takes the extraordinary songwriting and emotion from certain songs on his debut and makes it work over a full album. The rise in emotionless pop-'folk' this year (Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons, to name two of the worst offenders) has, to its credit, made this kind of thing fashionable again, and I think we could be about to have a 2011 renaissance of genuine folk albums like this. Even if they do come from Sweden.
	3 - Wive - Pvll An album apparently recorded over the internet, with the band never completely assembling, this is probably the most beautiful, and underappreciated, record of the year. Primarily using a violin and some samples as percussion (including, most effectively, turntable hisses and pops), as well as a few guest musicians, London's own Wive managed to produce an album that combines the kind of rootsy melancholy of Bon Iver's debut with electronics and feedback. If I had to sum this up in one word, it would definitely be 'haunting', but that is to do a disservice to the variety that is present if you just scratch the surface of the record. Listen to 'Lazarvs and Dives' if nothing else.
	2 - The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night In the 'independent rock & pop' sections of the popular press, 2010 seems to have been the year of the Arcade Fire. Good as The Suburbs is, however, I think the Besnard Lakes wrote the best album to come out of the massively enviable Canadian indie scene this year. Very much an album to be listened to start-to-finish, the lush orchestrations and driving rhythms bring out the soaring melodies and implant them into your brain. The twin vocals of the husband-and-wife team of Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas work perfectly together, interlocking and alternating in style. Every single one of the tracks here, especially up to track 5 or so, is a potential highlight. The songs feel like I have always known them, without being 'catchy' per se. After this and their previous album, Dark Horse, the Besnard Lakes are well on their way to becoming one of my favourite bands.
	1 - The National - High Violet In the 3-year wait since their last, and best, album, Boxer, the National had built up some pretty big expectations. Their core fanbase, including  me, weren't originally completely convinced, with the new songs appearing to be their attempt to break into the mass market, lacking the  knowing witticism and intimacy of their previous albums. However, the album is a massive grower, and succeeds completely at what it tries to do, with songs like 'England' and 'Conversation 16' among the very best  of the year. Played live, even the weaker songs develop some remarkable character. In the last couple of months I have begun to appreciate this album a lot more, and think that it (unfortunately for their fans, fortunately for the band) could be the start of their ascent to genuine global levels. A worthy album of the year, from a band it's hard to imagine releasing anything that wouldn't also have claimed that title. Yes, I'm a bit of a fan-boy.

Live Review: The National @ the Brixton Academy, 30/11/2010

I'd seen the National a few times before this gig, the most recent being at the Royal Albert Hall in May. The release of their most recent album, High Violet, seems to have catapulted them, if not into the mainstream, at least into much larger venues. This was the second of three sold-out nights at the Brixton Academy, one of the largest venues in London, showing that there is a massive market for the National's brand of introspective baritone indie rock.

The openers, Phosphorescent, were enjoyable, but didn't seem to go down very well, with many of the audience talking throughout. Although a standard problem at gigs of this size, I don't think they did anything to help themselves, with the set seeming to fall half way between enjoyable indie pop and introspective folk - it didn't really succeed at either, and long drawn out guitar solos are never going to go down that well at a National gig. Still, good enough for me to want to track down an album or two for a more involved listen.

Starting with 'Runaway', they played a set that drew on each of their last 4 albums. All the new stuff was performed and received exactly as you would expect, with big singalongs on the singles and chin-stroking on 'Terrible Love' and 'Lemonworld'. Matt Berninger's voice was in fine fettle, despite him saying he had a sore throat, with his voice very high in the mix. The Dessners and Devendorfs were also obviously on top form, not least in their bantering with Berninger. The Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry guested on guitar on many of the new songs, continuing the run of special guests started by Sufjan Stevens the night before. The band gradually built the crowd up through the gig, with the majority of their slow-burning classics such as 'Slow Show' and 'Secret Meeting' played early on in the evening. After the raw, shouty interlude of 'Abel', from 'Alligator', the opening arpeggios of 'England' rang out (a song that, according to Berninger, has now been renamed 'France') into the void above our heads - I think High Violet was written to be performed in arenas like this, and none of the new songs struggled to fill the space. Fake Empire, possibly the National's most famous song following its use in Barack Obama's campaign material, closed the main set superbly.

The encore kicked off with a very nice surprise. 'Lucky You', the closer from their second album, 'Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers', is one of my favourite National songs, yet is rarely played live. As soon as the opening piano chords kicked in, a lovely hush came down over the room. Or, rather, over the whole room except one guy, standing right behind me, who told his friends that he 'didn't know this one' and started chattering away. He was hushed by his friends, but he, and others in the crowd, definitely took away some of the magic of seeing the National live. The advantages of a big gig were shown in the next song, however - Berninger launched himself into the crowd, racing like a pro (see what I did there?) to the very back of the auditorium, without even the luxury of a radio microphone. He continued this through the next song, Terrible Love, before returning to the stage and, with the Dessners, closing the gig by leading the whole 5000-strong crowd in a completely unplugged, unamplified version of 'Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks'. With this original and stunning finish still hanging in the atmosphere, we walked out into a Dickensian snowstorm on the streets of Brixton, which seemed incredibly fitting.

The Brixton Academy is surprisingly intimate for its size, but I think it's pretty unfortunate the National will probably never play the smaller venues in London again. With their star continuing to rise, the bad points of this gig might even be further magnified in the future. Despite these niggles, though, this was a truly triumphant gig, one of my best live experiences of the year.

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.