One of the questions I ask myself the more I listen to a song or album is: "am I being fair?" It seems tough to project an objective air about something you so openly profess your love for, as I have on a few occasions with the National, a band that has been a staple in my library for nearly (only) seven years.
With the release of their sixth LP, 4AD's "Trouble Will Find Me," I began asking myself that question even before I heard a word. Would I be fair to this record and judge it on its own merits, or would my history with the band color my glasses rose and render objectivity impossible? Fortunately, I think I've been able to hear this record objectively, and can evaluate it as impartially as I hoped I would be able to.
Opener "I Should Live In Salt," a tune Matt Berninger penned about his brother - and documentarian - Tom, starts off with an element immediately unusual to the band: strummed guitar chords. Brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner have a penchant and preference for picked notes, so to hear a strummed acoustic open a National album feels like it'd be indicative of a sea change.
In reality, though, that's pretty far from the truth. "Trouble" continues on the path "High Violet" began to blaze three years earlier: a more expansive sound in production, metered energy with moments of soaring emotion. Sufjan Stevens's influence was fairly evident on "High Violet," and more than a few of the vocal harmonies on "Trouble" evoke the feeling that he had something to do with it.
Singles "Demons" and "Don't Swallow the Cap" follow up, with the former packing more punch than the latter, especially once comfort sets in with its unusual time signature (me not being an expert, I can't recall if it was decided to be 8/7 or 7/4 or something else entirely). That trend continues into "Fireproof," the album's weakest track, which doesn't meander but doesn't ever get any more interesting as it goes.
What saves the album from a downward spiral starting right then and there is "Sea of Love," arguably the album's finest track, as the next to play. It serves as a transition that brings us out of the album's prologue and into the heart of the order. Energized by some trademark Bryan Devendorf drum rolls and a (restrained) yelling Berninger quizzing a "Jo," (or "Joe?") "what did Harvard teach you?"
"Trouble's" second half is pretty emotionally evocative, even by National standards. Berninger's smoother, post-smoking voice has a softer feel to it, and rarely has he seemed more vulnerable than on tracks like "I Need My Girl," the "oldest" of the album's tracks with live performances dating back to 2011. "This Is the Last Time" feels like the signature National song of the post-"Boxer" era, a calm starter that blossoms around Berninger's heart-on-sleeve lyrics until the frontman is shouting "I won't be vacant anymore / I won't be waiting anymore" as a proclamation of recovery...only to have the song grind to a halt as he confesses, "Jenny, I am in trouble."
Each of the album's second-half songs have a signature characteristic (or more). "Graceless" and its traded drum hits; "Slipped" and its poignant tag "I'll be a friend and a fuck-up, and everything / But I'll never be anything you ever want me to be;" "Humiliation" and its woozy lyrical drift; "Pink Rabbits" and its wonderful piano hook; and "Hard to Find" with its perfectly executed Sharon Van Etten cameo.
All of these things are solid elements and make for strong songs. They remind the listener that yes, this is the National you're listening to, but not quite the National you've grown up with. There is no "Mr. November" or "Fake Empire" on this album, no song that immediately registers as something really important and with limitless repeat play potential.
It's funny how that's the standard now with this band, and the one against which they'll be judged for as long as they continue to make music. If that's perceived as a slight, it's only because there are no fatal flaws on this album. There are flaws, to be sure, and those flaws are a bit more noticeable than those on the previous three albums. Its high points register about as high as the pinnacles of those previous albums, though, and "Trouble Will Find Me" will belong in the discussion of the year's best albums.
Grade: 9.0/10
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Why I Love This Song: "Call Your Girlfriend"
Thirty-six hours ago, I was unaware that Robyn's "Call Your Girlfriend" existed, but a fellow member of the Philadelphia Sports Internet Club, Mark Magowan, posted a video of Saturday Night Live's Taran Killam doing a pastiche of the dance from the original music video. I watched it, and when I spent the next evening driving through the night from my home in Madison, Wisconsin, to Columbus, Ohio, I pulled up Spotify on my phone and listened to this song about 25 times, headbanging and fist-pumping my way down I-70 like a Germanic synth-pop version of Tony Hale in the iconic Volkswagen commercial.
I am not a Robyn fan. I've been aware of her existence for some time, but before Thursday night, I had never listened to a single second of any of her original compositions. The only time I'd ever heard her sing before this week was upon viewing her and Jenny Wilson's overtly cheeky and earnest piano cover of Saul Williams' "List of Demands." And it was okay, but such an aggressive, angry political protest song loses something when two women from the socialist utopia that is Scandinavia do a cover version that would have been right at home as the B-side to "Let's Get Together" from the original Parent Trap. But I digress.
My life is now all about "Call Your Girlfriend." I love it. And here's why.
I am not a Robyn fan. I've been aware of her existence for some time, but before Thursday night, I had never listened to a single second of any of her original compositions. The only time I'd ever heard her sing before this week was upon viewing her and Jenny Wilson's overtly cheeky and earnest piano cover of Saul Williams' "List of Demands." And it was okay, but such an aggressive, angry political protest song loses something when two women from the socialist utopia that is Scandinavia do a cover version that would have been right at home as the B-side to "Let's Get Together" from the original Parent Trap. But I digress.
My life is now all about "Call Your Girlfriend." I love it. And here's why.
- It starts with the chorus. Seven beats and then right in--no pretension, no buildup, just recognizing that you've got a great hook that's the emotional and melodic center of the song and going all-in pre-flop with it.
- For that matter, you could say that this song has two choruses--the "Call your girlfriend / It's time you had the talk..." that the song starts with, then the "The only way her heart will mend / Is when she learns to love again..." There's not a whole lot of buildup (which is not to say the song is devoid of dynamic contrast), but I absolutely adore the chorus and appreciate that this song just plays it over and over instead of watering it down with less interesting material.
- I really like the subject matter. It's advocating a straightfoward, elegant way of dumping your main squeeze for your side piece. Not that I advocate such things, but I imagine it's a complicated emotional situation that's boiled down, in "Call Your Girlfriend" to a very simple directive. It's like if Paul Simon hadn't promised 47 more ways to leave your lover than he could actually deliver.
- The transition from the first chorus to the verse is the kind of transition that great pop songs are made of. Moving from the airy, spaced out chorus to a very rigid verse is a very kinetic, mechanical experience, like changing gears while driving--you can almost feel the beat shift, like it's dropping you from space into something regimented.
- Which leads into the real reason I love this song: the contrast between upbeats in the chorus and downbeats in the verses. It comes out in the video, how the dance moves from long, sweeping movements to short, stabbing movements.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Why I Love This Song: "Driftwood: A Fairy Tale/A Gentleman Caller"
My favorite album of all time is Arcade Fire's Funeral. No. 2 on that list is Cursive's The Ugly Organ, a 2003 emo/pesudo-hardcorey/indie rock concept album about empty sex and emotional abuse that seemed a lot more profound to me when I bought the record as a 17-year-old than it does now.
But I still absolutely adore that album, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me to this day. But I will tell you why I love tracks seven ("Driftwood: A Fairy Tale") and eight ("A Gentleman Caller"), which constitute the Ruth and Gehrig of this record.
"Driftwood" is, pretty much, the story of Pinocchio set to a musical score that makes you confused about whether the tingling you get is an itch to dance or just your skin crawling.
The continuing rhythmic theme in this song comes in with the strings immediately. That [1+2...+4...] beat goes from cello to guitar to bass to drum set and then carries on in some combination of those instruments throughout the song.
And that's creepy as shit.
Because that rhythmic pattern is what you'd expect to find in a song by, like, Black Kids or Of Montreal, you know, a synthy, danceable beat that you serve some weird semi-erotic lyrics and a bitchin' bass guitar line the way you'd serve a good steak with mixed greens, a baked potato and a glass of red wine. But in "Driftwood," that beat is continuously moving through the dynamic layers like a dolphin jumping out of the water, and it's weaving in and out of some sneakily dark layered vocals and an absolutely menacing cello. It makes you want to dance, but not really sure how to. Not unlike the motions of a marionette.
Lyrically, it's a pretty straightforward song that gets a little heavy-handed at times, even if the recurring chorus of "My arms, my legs, my heart, my face..." bounces over the aforementioned theme quite nicely and conveys the sense of astonished self-awareness you'd expect from a newly-animated toy.
But the real payoff comes in one of my favorite crescendos in modern rock, a four-measure buildup to screaming desperation (around 2:26 in the video, though you'll have to click through to YouTube) that contains two of my favorite musical devices: the running, progressively-louder eighth-note drum hits, then the stinger and the beat of silence, after which the song reaches its full climax, when the astonishment turns to distress--"Now I wonder how I was made! Now I wonder how I was made!" and so on.
Then the song ends and you get about a minute's worth of background white noise.
Then the start of "A Gentleman Caller."
I'm not, like, immensely interested in the first half of this song, except that you probably ought to be aware that it's coming, because the minute-long mumbled interlude after "Driftwood" might put you to sleep. Then you get tossed directly into, well, a song that's pretty onomatopoetic.
The first minute and a half or so of "A Gentleman Caller" sound like a musical interpretation of the lyrics, a cheating drunkard of a man coming home and getting into a shouting match with his girlfriend. You can almost hear the broken lamp and the point where they stop caring about waking the baby.
"Driftwood" is in a fairly subdued, brisk walking pace 4/4, while "A Gentleman Caller" starts out noisy and between the wild fluctuations in volume and instrumentation, starts to make you a little seasick. It's violent, it's angry, it's absolutely irrational.
Then it turns into something completely different.
Around a minute and a half in, everything drops out except the guitar, then the cello, and instead of the sweeping, noisy, menacing violence of the first 85 seconds of the song, we get quiet, even eighth notes, then the cello, which, for the past song and a half, had been in your closet, waiting for you to fall asleep so it could jump out and eat you, switches to series of warm, swelling, legato countermelodies. And one by one, all the other instruments come in in one majestic, hopeful swell, like the end of RENT except without being abjectly terrible.
I fell in love with this record when I was about 16 years old, and over the past decade (the album turned 10 years old last month), it's stuck with me because it is a dark, cynical and for lack of a better word ugly story. It's about shallow, angry, selfish people who yell at people who don't deserve it and wake up in strange places having fucked people they don't like very much. It takes a dim view of humanity, not because it's a profound, transcendent statement, but because it's cynical. And in this case, I mean cynical in the manner suggested by the author Joe Klein, who wrote "Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre."
I wouldn't accuse Cursive frontman Tim Kasher of being particularly intelligent or insightful. Cursive has never done anything approaching the quality of The Ugly Organ before or since, and in every interview setting I've seen him in, he comes off as thinking he's a lot more clever than he actually is. Listen to The Ugly Organ and you'll think less of people. Listen to Domestica or Happy Hollow and you'll think less of the people who wrote The Ugly Organ. This record makes me feel bad when I listen to it. It's pessimistic and angry and if I had it on vinyl I'd have worn straight through it because I am a pessimistic, arrogant, angry, selfish person who doesn't think very highly of other people in general.
But 90 seconds into "A Gentleman Caller," it's different. For the first time, you get genuine tenderness. Optimism. The cello turns from menacing (which is not an exaggeration--you feel like that thing is out to get you for the first seven tracks and change) to hopeful. After seven songs of pettiness, insults, violence and sexual manipulation, you get an apology. And as the crescendo reaches its climax, you get the line that becomes a refrain that carries over to the ten-minute finale of the album, "Staying Alive." It's aggressively simple and feverishly optimistic. It's the line a child would write, because it's direct and offers an almost naively hopeful outlook. I've been murmuring this little bit to myself for ten years, and sometimes it's true, and sometimes I think it's because you can't be truly pessimistic and truly spiteful and truly angry without anything to compare it to.
But whatever the reason, after seven and a half songs of darkness and manipulation and fucking and screaming and throwing lamps, you get this:
"Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, the worst is over."
But I still absolutely adore that album, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me to this day. But I will tell you why I love tracks seven ("Driftwood: A Fairy Tale") and eight ("A Gentleman Caller"), which constitute the Ruth and Gehrig of this record.
"Driftwood" is, pretty much, the story of Pinocchio set to a musical score that makes you confused about whether the tingling you get is an itch to dance or just your skin crawling.
The continuing rhythmic theme in this song comes in with the strings immediately. That [1+2...+4...] beat goes from cello to guitar to bass to drum set and then carries on in some combination of those instruments throughout the song.
And that's creepy as shit.
Because that rhythmic pattern is what you'd expect to find in a song by, like, Black Kids or Of Montreal, you know, a synthy, danceable beat that you serve some weird semi-erotic lyrics and a bitchin' bass guitar line the way you'd serve a good steak with mixed greens, a baked potato and a glass of red wine. But in "Driftwood," that beat is continuously moving through the dynamic layers like a dolphin jumping out of the water, and it's weaving in and out of some sneakily dark layered vocals and an absolutely menacing cello. It makes you want to dance, but not really sure how to. Not unlike the motions of a marionette.
Lyrically, it's a pretty straightforward song that gets a little heavy-handed at times, even if the recurring chorus of "My arms, my legs, my heart, my face..." bounces over the aforementioned theme quite nicely and conveys the sense of astonished self-awareness you'd expect from a newly-animated toy.
But the real payoff comes in one of my favorite crescendos in modern rock, a four-measure buildup to screaming desperation (around 2:26 in the video, though you'll have to click through to YouTube) that contains two of my favorite musical devices: the running, progressively-louder eighth-note drum hits, then the stinger and the beat of silence, after which the song reaches its full climax, when the astonishment turns to distress--"Now I wonder how I was made! Now I wonder how I was made!" and so on.
Then the song ends and you get about a minute's worth of background white noise.
Then the start of "A Gentleman Caller."
I'm not, like, immensely interested in the first half of this song, except that you probably ought to be aware that it's coming, because the minute-long mumbled interlude after "Driftwood" might put you to sleep. Then you get tossed directly into, well, a song that's pretty onomatopoetic.
The first minute and a half or so of "A Gentleman Caller" sound like a musical interpretation of the lyrics, a cheating drunkard of a man coming home and getting into a shouting match with his girlfriend. You can almost hear the broken lamp and the point where they stop caring about waking the baby.
"Driftwood" is in a fairly subdued, brisk walking pace 4/4, while "A Gentleman Caller" starts out noisy and between the wild fluctuations in volume and instrumentation, starts to make you a little seasick. It's violent, it's angry, it's absolutely irrational.
Then it turns into something completely different.
Around a minute and a half in, everything drops out except the guitar, then the cello, and instead of the sweeping, noisy, menacing violence of the first 85 seconds of the song, we get quiet, even eighth notes, then the cello, which, for the past song and a half, had been in your closet, waiting for you to fall asleep so it could jump out and eat you, switches to series of warm, swelling, legato countermelodies. And one by one, all the other instruments come in in one majestic, hopeful swell, like the end of RENT except without being abjectly terrible.
I fell in love with this record when I was about 16 years old, and over the past decade (the album turned 10 years old last month), it's stuck with me because it is a dark, cynical and for lack of a better word ugly story. It's about shallow, angry, selfish people who yell at people who don't deserve it and wake up in strange places having fucked people they don't like very much. It takes a dim view of humanity, not because it's a profound, transcendent statement, but because it's cynical. And in this case, I mean cynical in the manner suggested by the author Joe Klein, who wrote "Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre."
I wouldn't accuse Cursive frontman Tim Kasher of being particularly intelligent or insightful. Cursive has never done anything approaching the quality of The Ugly Organ before or since, and in every interview setting I've seen him in, he comes off as thinking he's a lot more clever than he actually is. Listen to The Ugly Organ and you'll think less of people. Listen to Domestica or Happy Hollow and you'll think less of the people who wrote The Ugly Organ. This record makes me feel bad when I listen to it. It's pessimistic and angry and if I had it on vinyl I'd have worn straight through it because I am a pessimistic, arrogant, angry, selfish person who doesn't think very highly of other people in general.
But 90 seconds into "A Gentleman Caller," it's different. For the first time, you get genuine tenderness. Optimism. The cello turns from menacing (which is not an exaggeration--you feel like that thing is out to get you for the first seven tracks and change) to hopeful. After seven songs of pettiness, insults, violence and sexual manipulation, you get an apology. And as the crescendo reaches its climax, you get the line that becomes a refrain that carries over to the ten-minute finale of the album, "Staying Alive." It's aggressively simple and feverishly optimistic. It's the line a child would write, because it's direct and offers an almost naively hopeful outlook. I've been murmuring this little bit to myself for ten years, and sometimes it's true, and sometimes I think it's because you can't be truly pessimistic and truly spiteful and truly angry without anything to compare it to.
But whatever the reason, after seven and a half songs of darkness and manipulation and fucking and screaming and throwing lamps, you get this:
"Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, the worst is over."
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