The National - Alligator
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Free Music Notes for Alligator
Free Music Review: Enigmatic, Hypnotic, Terrific
Hit: 5 Stars
"I need some meaning I can memorize," Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst once sang. It was a great lyric about a universal need--the need to not just find meaning in this complicated world, but to reduce that meaning into simple truths we can take with us everywhere. And this exquisite album by The National sounds like it was tailor-made to fill that bill. In fact, these songs aren't just memorizable--they're unforgettable.
First, a little note. By my reckoning, there are two types of music lovers: horn people and string people. Horn people can listen to string music, and vice versa, and large swaths of music have neither instrument, but everyone has a preference between the two. For the most part, horns are happy, upbeat daytime instruments. They do some mournful songs, but it's not an everyday thing. And so horn people are bright and full of sunshine, and they get married and live in the suburbs and have 2.3 kids and are always in bed by 10.
This is a string person's album.
But it's far more than that. "Alligator" is one of the most listenable and captivating and sadly underappreciated albums to come our way since the turn of the millennium. It's an album with a lot to say about our loves and lives and lies. If you're anything like me, you'll listen to it a lot, and the more you listen to it, the more you want to listen to it. And you'll save it for after nightfall, for it's one of those lonely, staring-out-your-window-at-the-night-streets albums.
You can trust this album, because it's honest with its feelings, and because it's consistent in the best possible sense--not the I-don't-have-a-lot-of-ideas sense, but the everything's-in-its-right-place sense. Some of the songs are slow and sad, but even the up-tempo ones aren't happy; they are just full of urgency and immediacy to counter the smoky languor elsewhere. The guitars are sometimes charged and sometimes mellow, the strings are sorrowful, and everything swirls together beautifully. And floating half-submerged through the mix, we hear Matt Berninger's wonderful baritone, always sounding as if it's either drowning in drink or spewing it out in anger. It's a perfect voice for this music, sadder than the strings, lonelier than the walk of shame.
Some people sing to the masses; Berninger's singing for an audience of one. You. Actually, it's not so much you, the listener, as it is "you." You the significant other, you the ex, you the best friend and betrayer, you the member of a relationship so important it rarely needs proper nouns. He does name names, here and there--Karen, John, Val Jester, Abel--but in a sense they don't matter. "You're the low life of the party," he sings on "Lit Up", and you don't know if he's singing at you or singing your thoughts, but it works either way, because if you're anything like me, you've lived these songs as the singer, or the singee, or both, and you can play your mental Mad Libs and fill in your own names as needed.
Still, one senses this is a deeply personal album. "Yeah say something perfect, something I can steal," Berninger sings on "Baby We'll Be Fine," and you know (or at least I know, because I spent years quoting my friends and lovers and presenting it as fiction) that's the line of an artist who is literally putting all of himself into his work. There are plenty of stellar moments on this album, but that song highlights what's best about this band. In it, Berninger chants "I'm so sorry for everything," over and over, so often you end up thinking the guy must be Catholic. The specific meaning's enigmatic, but the effect is still hypnotic; these are the mantras we tell others, and tell ourselves, to make this complicated world make sense.
Free Music Review: A Brooklyn Band
Hit: 5 Stars
Most of what needs to be said about The National has been said in the other reviews. Their music is dark and deep, catchy, mournful, lovelorn, wise and strangely hopeful. There's a mystic reaching desire to it, a searching need for something redeeming, even messianic.
Aren't all of us out "looking for astronauts?"
The music shares some of the lapidiary chamber-pop sensibility of The Arcade Fire, but certainly they also share this with Brooklyn bands like P.S and Searay. And there's no need to classify them as "Canadian" because of such a cursory similarity.
As something of an aside, I have to say that the constant desire of critics, even the Amazon reviewer on this very page, to classify bands (strangely only Indie Rock bands) according to geography so that a band's location or location of origin is supposed to dictate everything we need to know about them is very strange and, to be honest, not terribly useful. Especially in the age of the Internet. But, that being said, I can make a solid geographic case for them.
The National shares plenty with, since these are the bands mentioned by the reviewer, Interpol and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeah's. Rhythmlines to start with, both bass and drums, propulsive and staccato; certainly Patti Smith and The Velvet Underground as immediate ancestors; lyrics with almost constant NYC geographic and thematic references and a deep desire to cloak themselves in the outward trappings of what used to be the "Downtown" music scene (a scene now made up of bands almost exclusively living, practicing, and, in many cases, playing, in Brooklyn).
When I say trappings, I mean the clothing they wear on stage, the art on Alligator's cover, and the sensibility of their lyrics which, as mentioned above, are steeped a perspective both dark and emotionally cool, sometimes cold, on the edge of callousness that is often associated with New York. Things that might seem peripheral to the music, but informs everything about them.
Play, in a row, Interpol's song Evil, the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Maps and The National's Abel and the musical similarities aren't just obvious, they're striking.
New York is famously a city of immigrants, the destination of peoples from all over the world who come here for the opportunities they see in America and, conversely, the destination of people from all over America who don't see opportunity in their own state or home town. Many of those people are artists, writers, photographers and musicians.
The National very comfortably fits into this tradition. They might have come here from Ohio. To the Amazon reviewer, they might sound Canadian, but to this Georgian who moved to Brooklyn and became a fan of an entire continuum of Brooklyn Bands that encompasses the alt-country rock fusion of the The Mendoza Line, the rock funk of TV on the Radio, the unabashedly happy pop-punk messianism of Palomar, the soaring Utopian longings of the already mentioned Searay, and the disconcertingly lonely defiance of Stellastarr, I'd say that The National most clearly belongs, if labeled geographically, nowhere so much as Brooklyn where they are the perfect soundtrack when it's late at night and you're in hipsterville headed up Metropolitan Avenue with Manhattan glittering behind you and you're walking against the wind just trying to get yourself home.
Free Music Review: It Has Legs, Maybe Very Long Ones
Hit: 5 Stars
Alligator hooked me from the start and the hook (and hooks) has only become more firmly embedded since. In fact, I have a hard time listening to all the cuts at one sitting because I wind up putting so many of them on interminable repeat play.
It is no Blonde on Blonde (what is?), but I think maybe twenty or thirty years from now Alligator's listeners will play it on whatever medium music is served up in at that future and they will think, like I do with, from around that Blonde on Blonde era, say, Surrealistic Pillow or the Byrds first album, "whoa, these guys were on to something."
On the very best songs here, the music and voice/lyrics often work at cross-purposes producing a fusion that shouldn't succeed at all but in fact elevates both.
The music first. Try to find a single indulgent or extraneous note in songs like Lit Up, Abel, Friend of Mine or Mr. November. They are, rather, three to four minute hard pop gems, underpinned, and in Abel launched, by a tense and insistent drum line that courses through the song, as guitars, vocals, remix vocals layer on it and the listener tumbles into this deliberate, disciplined mix.
The lyrics, however, are everything but disciplined. They are - for starters -- faintly paranoid (Secret Meeting), confused and louche (Karen, which of course also features a suggested telephone call that can only be embarrassing to all involved in it), achingly loyal (Friend of Mine), satiric and disdainful (All the Wine), full of illusionary control (Lit Up), mixes of promise and delusion (Mr. November, "in the arms of cheerleaders" indeed), and a poster slogan for the designated driver campaign (Abel). But most of all, I think, Alligator matters and will last because it embraces all these impulses (as in Looking for Astronauts - or as my daughter had it the first time she heard the song - Looking for Restaurants, often a little too late for them as well -- "Take all your reasons and take them away/To the middle of nowhere...they all run together and never make sense/But that's how we like and that's all we want."), understanding that complexity and contradiction are in the end what makes us conscious, interesting and human.
Alligator is not perfect. I regularly skip Baby, We'll Be Fine and Val Jester, but as a portrait of a band in journey, journey as in Eliot's great "We shall not cease from exploration..." lines, Alligator is a brave and very successful work.
Free Music Review: Sublime, sad, rocks its way into your brain
Hit: 5 Stars
I gave this a try based on Spin's rave and the fact that I think a similar band, the Arcade Fire, is swell. At first listen, I thought the National was a bit repetitive, a little too emo, and kinda like a Smith's rip off band.
Boy, was I really, really wrong.
This band's ballads rock, and its rock songs possess an emotional urgency that you usually only see in ballads. I wouldn't call this emo, but maybe urgent chamber pop? Baroque rock? Whatever the National is doing, it's producing music that seems almost like fine literature....addictive, lush, loaded with smart, grown-up lyrics. It's as good as the Arcade Fire if not better.
Much has been made of lead singer Matt Berninger's baritone, comparing it to the growls of Morrissey or Nick Cave. It's an apt description, but Berninger also channels the dude from Crash Test Dummies and even early Bono (before he turned into an Ipod monster with mediocre, over-orchestrated songs). Berninger sings in an ironic tone without being morose. He's wry and heartbroken without being snarky a la the band Cake.
His band is held together by tight drumming, ever-changing guitars, spiraling violens and some very effective background chanting choruses.
There isn't a bad song on this record, but the opening track," Secret Meeting" shines by managing to sound like a cross between Roxy Music and the Clash, a kind of rich, moody rock anthem. Softer songs, including the funny "Looking for Astronauts" and the sad, elegiac "Daughters of the SoHo Riots," are be good ballads without being sappy, crappy Air Supply or Dashboard Confessional drek.
I really can't recommend this album enough. It's unusual, lovely and I can't wait to see what they come up with next.
Free Music Review: Five and a half stars!
Hit: 5 Stars
I bought this record on the strength of various message boards on the net thinking that the masses could not possibly be wrong. I was right. This might be the best record released in 2005. From the beginning insecurities of SECRET MEETING, to the final promising cries of MR NOVEMBER, this is a moody, brooding masterpiece. It is a gem that is waiting to be discovered by someone willing to surrender to the brilliance of John Berninger & Co.
What I find stands out most apart from the obvious drum engine driving this record forward is the amazing lyrics sung by such an amazing voice. They evoke such imagery very much like Antony and the Johnsons.... self-defeat but tinged with a sense of hope that things will be fine in the end. I also really appreciate how they use the piano in most of the songs. As a piano player myself, I like it when the piano is in the forefront but here they use it so sparingly yet it is so effective. You have to hear KAREN and DAUGHTERS OF THE SOHO RIOTS to know what I am talking about and why I needed to mention it.
Now I don't want you to think this record will put you to sleep because there are full-throttle rock numbers on here.... LIT UP and ABEL to name a couple. It's all good. Although I can hear early U2 influences along with the other references listed in the previous reviews, they are really their own sound. All I can say is if you feel your record collection is missing that special CD of 2005, congrats... you found it. Now buy it!