31 of ’13
8. The National – Trouble Will Find Me
As Grantland’s Steven Hyden delineated in his excellent music year-in-review piece, the release of 2013’s tentpole albums involved all varieties of excessive marketing shenanigans, from music festival commercials to giant fucking trucks emblazoned with the name of a Katy Perry album no one seemed to like. The goal was to shove them, #2020Experience /#ARTPOP style, into a collective social media consciousness, thereby making them relevant and demanding that you listen, else you risk being left out of a conversation. (I listened to Bangerz three times and even made it through Magna Carta…Holy Grail, for fuck’s sake.)
In the case of virtually all of these event records, they couldn’t live up to all the bullshit surrounding them, ultimately more memorable for how they tried to create a moment than their actual music. (Reflektor probably came closest, but the bullshit was so mountainous that by the time it hit the web AS A 90 MINUTE LYRIC VIDEO Sgt. Pepper’s would have felt like a disappointment.)
In the midst of this rattle and hum, one of the most acclaimed rock bands on earth put out an album.
By all rights, The National following up a virtually unparalleled three-album winning streak (from breakthrough Alligator in 2007 to High Violet in 2011) should have been important. But instead of manufacturing a hype cycle, they did what confident, old-fashioned bands like The National have been doing for years – they put out a couple of songs, then released an album. “Demons” and “Don’t Swallow the Cap” didn’t try to start a conversation, make a statement or offer potential hashtags. They were just National songs. (Decent and very good ones, respectively.)
It’s probably true to this band, though, that Trouble Will Find Me didn’t make a lot of noise. On High Violet, for all its merit, you could occasionally hear The National straining, pushing for a broader audience after releasing their masterwork. Like they were supposed to put out their The Suburbs and become the next indie band that the Grammys recognize to boost their near-zero credibility. Consequently, some of its epic strokes seemed slightly out of place.
Now, with their big swing behind them, The National are back to just being The National. A subdued release for a subdued record, probably their second-best after Boxer. It makes no concessions to listeners uninterested in their minimal, contemplative and literate music, no apologies for their arts-major attitude, no changes to appease those who quite wrongly dismiss Matt Berninger’s expressive baritone as lazy mumbling. It’s the kind of record they could conceivably put out every few years into eternity, which is a remarkable thing, because if this is auto-pilot, I’m not sure any band has a better auto-pilot. Trouble Will Find Me is exceptional.
Once again, Berninger is wrestling with middle age and broken relationships at empty city bars. On “Demons” he laments “I am secretly in love with everyone I grew up with,” the first instantly-quotable line anyone heard from the album and a perfect encapsulation of the darkly-funny self-loathing romanticism he’s mastered.
“Demons” might actually be the least-interesting song here, hewing dangerously close to the mumbly caricature that the band’s critics believe to be real. There’s far greater dynamics, momentum and emotion everywhere else. “Graceless” and “Sea of Love” are the quiet hurricanes, swelling to subtly epic proportions and anthemic refrains. “Heavenfaced” and especially “I Need My Girl” are delicate, yearning things, the latter built from a simple, repeated chiming guitar figure and Berninger’s vocals, as vulnerable as a song called “I Need My Girl” requires.
Penultimate (DRINK!) track “Pink Rabbits” slowly reveals itself as the standout, The National doing a stumbling barroom lament. It’s grown on me over the last six months; what initially felt like a languid, almost rhythm-less mope started sounding like one of the most open-hearted, honest pieces of music they’ve ever recorded. It has a sense of place; it could be any old, empty bar in some imagined version of New York, a dusty piano in the corner, an empty glass on top of it and a heartbroken drunk in a weathered suit destroying himself in song, “a television version of a person with a broken heart.” It’s sighing coda, “you said it would be painless / it wasn’t that at all,” is as powerful as anything they’ve recorded not called “Slow Show”.
(Or it isn’t and the fact that I’m writing this on a quiet late-night flight with a plastic cup of bad Scotch beside me is having an effect.)
Trouble Will Find Me is a particularly understated work from an understated band, but as rich and layered as anything they’ve done. The range of tempos and melodies is more limited than on the bolder High Violet, but The National have so mastered this sound that they create wonderful pictures within narrowly-defined margins. So six months on, with the dust of the exclusive Samsung apps and guerrilla music video marketing settled, an album virtually devoid of bombast ended up taking its place comfortably among several publications’ best albums of the year. And also mine, for whatever that’s worth.
Words, by Andrew Evans 