The National, a Brooklyn-based rock outfit, have a reputation for poetic, subdued music that is carried by the distinct and melancholic baritone of Matt Berninger. In their last two recordings, his octave rarely rises above a resonating bass. So, judging from their recent work, you wouldn’t take him to be a screamer.
But when I saw him live on August 8 at the First Avenue Theatre (Minneapolis), his eventual raspy shrieks seemed so appropriate for a band that approaches the world with a very felt disillusionment.
I stood among the 30-something, world-weary Minneapolis bar crowd and watched Matt on stage, twitching nervously, tapping his hands together, and squatting to the floor. These timid gestures were, to that point, his most emotive actions.
Shedding the jacket of a classy brown suit, Matt took a sip of his lemonade with a little something in it. “This song is for all you bitter people out there.” The crowd cheered. “Yeah, we’re all a little bitter tonight.” He proceeded to scream the lyrics to “Abel,” a song about midlife psychosis which appears on their 2005 album, “Alligator.” “My mind’s not right, my mind’s not right,” he sang, leaving the mournful baritone for a moment. With the vigorous last line, he lifted the microphone stand into the air and stumbled back. It was awesome.
Just five years ago, you might have expected that raw sound following their first critical masterpiece, “Alligator.” However, you won’t hear any literal screams on “High Violet,” the band’s fifth studio recording. Their latest is clean, polished, reserved, and somehow every bit as emotional.
The album starts with the sonorous, cymbal-crashing “Terrible Love”, and ends with the slow, quiet “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks.” In between, there’s a range of musical feeling. But, in general, their guitars seem softer, less edgy. The lonely-sounding Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver) provides vocal accompaniment, which probably says something about the spirit of their latest. At the same time, this record does have a more percussive presence than their last (“Boxer,” 2007).
Lyrically, they’re still contemplating “the un-magnificent lives of adults.” Berninger, as the narrator, tells his lover that she and her sisters live in a “Lemonworld.” He assumes that he would be happy to “sit in and die” there, since the world he lives in is much more nihilistic (“try to find something on this thing that means nothing”).
In “Afraid of Everyone,” they find themselves as a part of post-9/11 xenophobia, which they consider a “venom” of the press. As a result, they cannot distinguish friends from enemies, but “try not to hurt anybody [they] like.” Furthermore, there are no drugs to “sort out” this kind of anxiety.
“Bloodbuzz Ohio” brings them to their home state, which may not be a place they want to be: “I still owe money to the money to the money I owe,” Berninger sings.
My personal favorite song on the album is “Conversation 16,” which is about marital problems (“Try to hold it together ‘til our friends are gone”). The narrator makes a zombie-like analogy of himself and his supposed inadequacy. “I was afraid, I’d eat your brains, ‘cuz I’m evil.”
The National have made a stirring album about what it’s like to live in the U.S. today. Full of fear, diminished confidence, lost potential, and financial woes, High Violet reflects on the collected, suppressed anger that grows out of our daily problems. Berninger suggests on the final song (“Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks”) that there may be something of an escape: “leave your home, change your name, live alone, eat your cake.”
But I don’t believe Berninger. After seeing The National in concert, I don’t believe that they think everything is that simple. Instead, Berninger lets the gloom linger a while. Eventually, he screams into it, which is a more satisfying solution to him and to us.