...The Best Album For 2005...

Bio

On New Year's Eve 2004, I ran into The National's singer, Matt Berninger, at a party in Brooklyn. He looked pretty much as he had the last couple of times I'd seen him, like he'd been locked up at home for days on end, trapped in thoughts, books, and videotapes. An old friend asked him what it was like to have left behind the world of regular employment, and I overheard this reply: "Don't get too into your band. You'll be poor, and happy, and never want to do anything else ever again."

All you need to know about The National is that they gave up good jobs for this. But perhaps you want more:

They are five friends from Cincinnati, Ohio, who started making music in 1999, when they found themselves living near one another again in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. They weren't looking to take over the world with a demo and matching outfits. Rather, music was their way of letting off steam from those good jobs. Records are what they talked about when they went out drinking together, when they ate together, when they played Wiffle ball in the summertime.

Simply put, songwriting allowed The National to deepen their conversations. It's how they broached the topics they really wanted to talk about - how they were past the halfway mark between twenty and thirty, and speeding toward a kind of permanence they never expected; how they pleased and disappointed their mothers and fathers; how flings had become girlfriends, and girlfriends, wives.



Thankfully, the band's pre-existing bonds lent this musical conversation an unusual intimacy. The National contains two pairs of brothers -- Aaron Dessner (guitars, bass) and Bryce Dessner (guitar), Scott Devendorf (guitar; bass) and Bryan Devendorf (drums). Matt sings because he's taller, blonder, and older than the rest.

The National (Brassland 2001) was recorded and released before they played a single show, before the music spilled far from their heads. They cut the album with engineer Nick Lloyd and formed a label with a writer (yours truly), so those recordings could be released.

Nothing happened.

The National made a second album, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers (Brassland/Talitres 2003). The staff was the same, though Peter Katis, who produced both Interpol records, helped produce and mix, and Australian composer Padma Newsome from Clogs collaborated on arrangements and strings. The result got noticed by Rolling Stone and other magazines. When the record made its way to Europe, magazines the band had never heard of began saying it was one of the year's best.

A show at their favourite bar became a van ride to neighbouring cities, became a plane ride to Europe, became two summers overseas. Their ties to those good jobs slackened.



Recently, The National have signed to Beggars Banquet, but they continue on their own path. Four have moved further out in Brooklyn to Ditmas Park, where there is space and familiar suburban streets and even Geese on Beverley Road. Their new album, Alligator (Beggars Banquet, 2005), much of which was recorded at their homes in Ditmas Park, was engineered by Paul Mahajan, who has worked with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV on the Radio. Padma Newsome camped out for a month with the band, and Peter Katis added more production and mixed the record at his house in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Matt Berninger's potent baritone still intones about matters fraught and funny and sad; about record collections, missing persons and medium-sized American hearts.

But the record's not simply gothic or miserablist - more like the plays of Tennessee Williams, it •s full of peculiar intimacies and awkward grace. Alligator's heroes are reckless and possessed seducers, but they are apologetic ones. In The National's imaginings, in songs alternately lush and spare, there is something twilit and dreamy worked out in the basement of our brains.

Bio By The Label

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Reviews



Ere’s a little quiz for you. Please take a moment to reflect. Answer honestly and no peeking at your neighbors papers. Proceed:

1) True or False: Stellastarr* was a good idea poorly executed.
2) True of False: Elefant was so concerned with rock posturing the songs got lost in the shuffle.
3) True or False: Coldplay writes pretty songs but need a swift kick in the ‘nads.
4) True of False: Joy Division is currently the band most cleverly copped by today’s indie-rock ruling elite.
5) True or False: The Strokes are a naked rip-off shamelessly proffered as something original.
6) Please open your blue books and write at least 300 words on this theme: According to Pablo Picasso good art is created, but great art is stolen.
If you answered true to the above questions then The National is patiently waiting to be your favorite band. All the members of The National reside in Brooklyn, by way of Cincinnati. The band consists of two sets of brothers playing instruments and banging on things and singer Matt Berninger baring the blood and guts of heartbreak and remorse in the best sounding Ian Curtis you’ve heard since, well, Ian Curtis. If Chris Martin wrote songs and made records as if he were the bully and not the kid getting his lunch money stolen, Coldplay would sound like The National. Okay, this one’s even better: If Chris Martin and that Paltrow woman were thrust into a Raymond Carver short story becoming half-cocked motel operators along Interstate 95 in Florida, Martin might write songs like The National routinely conjure up.

Now on to item #5 on the above quiz. Everything is derivative. The task at hand is making it sound or feel or read like something that hasn’t already gone before. The challenge is to steal the old, acknowledge the theft, and spit it back coated in your own ideas. Bands that are able to incorporate past styles and move forward are ultimately the most musically successful and most respected. It’s something that Interpol, Magnolia Electric Co., Knife & Fork, the freak folk movement, and The National have done. It’s what The Strokes, The Bravery, The Killers, and The Thieves haven’t done.

Alligator, the second album from The National, is an unabashedly dynamic record. The beats are propulsive, the guitars vary from clean and incisive to ragged and dripping, piano haunts the corners, strings cling to the melodies like moss, boy/girl harmonies arrive unexpectedly, the lyrics are clever, obtuse, metaphoric character studies of lives misjudged and decisions reflected on with regret.

While The National make a wonderful noise, the star of the show is lead singer Matt Berninger’s baritone. His voice is perfectly suited to his lyrical content, but more importantly it’s perfectly suited to the music that strains around him. Berninger recalls the previously mentioned Curtis on an up day or Brett Sparks of The Handsome Family minus the Americana spirit. When he sings a lyric like “didn't anybody tell you how to gracefully disappear in a room,” it’s a question, order, and invocation of pity all at once. When he sings about his “medium sized American heart” it’s with sadness and celebration. When the band rips into the chorus of “Lit Up” it’s like stepping off a cliff and not falling, we hover above water, held in place by the shouted lyrics.

“Baby We’ll Be Fine” is a devastatingly nuanced portrait of a struggling couple. Berninger’s small details, “you spilled Jack and Coke on my collar,” are accents to the dysfunctionality that the song chronicles. Drums ring in the background, a small string section struggles to be heard above the guitars, Berninger sings, “Baby, come over I need entertaining, say something perfect I can steal.” It’s all carefully laid out, divided into equal parts beauty and pain, dependency and desperation.

Throughout Alligator certain lyrical snippets fly from the speakers like drops of jellied gasoline, carried by a segment of violin, the ringing of a sublimely clean three note guitar run, or the frantic pounding of drums, these words stick to your skin:
“You should have looked after her better, you should have locked the door.”
“Fill the coat with weapons and help her get it on.”
“I’m a birthday candle in a circle of black girls, God is on my side.”
“I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders.”
In all these moments The National is keenly aware of their purpose. They are writing rock songs, lyrically mysterious often deep rock songs but part of a genre nonetheless. Most of the songs hover at the three-minute mark, content to say their piece and move along. That’s not to say that these songs aren’t ambitious. They are decidedly unique in sound and scope. The National are able to pack as much power into the songs on Alligator as any of the more heralded indie-rock bands working right now, only The National have taken the common influences and grafted them into something altogether fresh and remarkable. Pencils down, it’s time to listen.

By Stylus Magazine



Matt Berninger (comparatively un-picturesque name notwithstanding) is a frontman in the grand tradition of Morrissey and Robert Smith -- not because he necessarily sounds like those guys (his syrupy baritone has more in common with Leonard Cohen), but because at first listen, he tends to upstage the music. It's not an easy feat; the two sets of brothers (Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Scott and Bryan Devendorf) behind Berninger create a tapestry that comes more and more into focus as Alligator repeats.
And make no mistake, this album will grow on you. You might love it right out of the shrinkwrap, or you might be all "ehhh", but you'll almost certainly end up liking it better than you did the first time you heard opener "Secret Meeting". The song features layers of intricately picked guitar and has an intimate small-room sound, as if to say "Come on in. It's a bit cozy, but we promise you'll like it in here."

There's a lot to like. Berninger's casual yet intense voice is an apt vehicle for his clever, occasionally wry lyrics; even when he's not being overtly sarcastic, there's a certain world-weary irony present. He's one of those singers who can curse so elegantly that the words aren't dirty; maybe it's the context, but "Put me in a chair / Fuck me and make me a drink" in the lovely but decidedly downbeat "Karen" sounds more languid than lascivious. Most of Alligator is like this: painstakingly crafted, casually baroque music for people who get off a little bit on feeling blue. It might not be the disc you throw on to get hyped up for a night out, but it has its lighter moments: the catchy little refrain nestled amid countryish fingerpicking in "Looking for Astronauts", "Abel"'s abrupt upswing into rough-voiced barroom swagger. Still, the more contemplative (read: depressing) tracks seem to better capture the band's essence. The restless paranoia of undulating bass and tap-tapping beats in "Friend of Mine" mesh well with its chorus ("I'm getting nervous / Na na na na na na na / No sign of a friend of mine"). "Baby, We'll Be Fine" sounds like a study in quiet desperation, with Berninger helplessly repeating "I'm so sorry for everything" as the guitars chime gently.

Alligator is the kind of record you get turned on to by a friend who heard it and thought of you. Like most rather sad music, it has the potential to dig down to where you really live and become something you put on when going through a breakup or after you get fired. But even if the attraction is no more than surface-deep, Alligator packs enough beauty to keep you interested for a long time.

By Splendid Magazine



"Abel" ~ Video

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For A Long Time They Were Only Sowing...Now It's Time To Reap It Up.