The National: Alligator & Boxer
The National dominates my brain right now. I have two albums: “Alligator” was going all Roman Empire on my iPod until their next album, “Boxer,” sacked it like Visigoths eventually having their way with Rome, leaving “Alligator” the Eastern Mediterranean empire known as Byzantine.
Ugh. Sorry, I went all Dennis Miller on you. No one deserves that.
The National are mellow, understated, almost loungey… but they possess an edge, cutting fine lines you won’t feel until it’s too late because the songs keep looping in your monkey brain.
Heh, a bit dramatic. But it’s that sort of music — it sneaks up on you.
For me, it started with “Secret Meeting,” the first slice off “Alligator.” Scott Dub hands me his iPod, orders me to check it out, bam: I’m sucked in. Anxious, paranoid, Kafkaesque, the lyrics sift through your head as you try to make out just what it is that motivates this song.
I think this place is full of spies
I think they’re onto me
Didn’t anybody, didn’t anybody tell you
Didn’t anybody tell you how to gracefully disappear in a room?
Mix in music that doesn’t seek to hook you as much as seduce you… well, it’s over. You’ll be hearing these songs in your head for weeks on end.
“Alligator” and “Boxer” aren’t albums I can listen to all the way through, and that confuses things a bit. I like most of the stuff on both, but not in sequence and not all at once. Layers of deep sounds dominate the tracks, and together with vocalist Matt Berninger’s low baritone, listening to either in their entireties is much like mixing Splenda and Sweet ‘N Low with a two-liter of Pepsi and downing the concoction in one vicious chug.
“Boxer” is better than “Alligator,” I think. Its first song, “Fake Empire,” paints lethargic, comfortable portraits of life in — well, you can argue NYC, USA, whatever. Our nice material existences color the song, yet the lyrics don’t preach and it’s beautiful. Move on to the next cut, “Mistaken for Strangers,” for some angst thrown in…
You get mistaken for strangers by your own friends
when you pass them at night
under the silvery silvery citybank lights
… and you’ve got the workings of an album that’s going to make you feel maudlin and introspective.
Unfortunately for you, the music won’t let you go and you’ll have to listen to it over and over again.
I’ve got ticket to see The National in the West Bay at the Grand Ballroom at the Regency Hotel on September 29. Maybe I’ll write about it, but hopefully I’ll be over the group by then, and writing about something else!
June 28th, 2008 at 2:41 am
Well goddamn. Now I may never finish my blog-post-allegedly-in-progress-since-Sunday, I Have an Inappropriate Relationship With The National, because having read this (I was randomly reading your, ahem, few and far between non-Twitter-archive posts), I will have a hard time not just stealing shit you’ve said, because you’ve done it so well. (Well I guess it’s not stealing if I credit and link back, but I’d like to think I’m capable of some original thought.)
“Anxious, paranoid, Kafkaesque” - No shit.
And now I’m laughing that while you’ve had the ‘Secret Meeting’ snippet in your myspace profile for however long, I had (at least until Spoon invaded my brain with “…famous sounding words make your head feel light” - although, ironically, their Don’t You Evah is actually a cover of a song by The Natural History, and I’m embarrassed to say I still haven’t heard the original)… specifically this Kafka quote:
Also - I realize you’ve only known me through one blog nukage (when my irritatingly obstruse, not to mention invented, title of “Anachroclysmic” was replaced with the dry, awfully literal “Square One” moniker, which I’m already twitching to change again), but one of the other times I killed off my blog, I just replaced it with a page of Kafka quotes. (I am so not awesome.)
I will blog Sunday’s show soon, but tonight (or I guess it was last night, oops…) I had to deal with the debris that followed it. So as usual my stuff will be all out of sequence and, no doubt, entirely too verbose (laugh, I totally deserve it), but I will get it done.
Oh, and I appreciate that you’ve kept me on your blogroll (I only recently noticed the scroll-over text, ha), and even if 90% of what you post for the rest of time consists of tweets I’ve already read once or thirty times, I’ll still put you back on my blogroll once my lazy ass gets around to doing a new one. (When I killed off the last blog incarnation, I just eliminated my links.) Though it’s going to be a lot shorter than the multi-category monstrosity I had before.
June 29th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Also, it’s clear from the URL of this post that your first draft was called Half awake in a fake empire (which I rather like). Are you not a believer in “first thought, best thought”?