Trouble Will Find Me
– The National
The National have developed a unique approach to traversing
the tightrope that runs between mass appeal rock anthems (hazard: brainlessness) and oblique/interesting exercises
in thought (hazard: indulgence.) For a few albums now, the enormous tension in
said rope has reduced a great many of their songs to a type of
incantation: oft-repeated phrasing and
sinusoid rhythm elements which, run out at unhurried length and refusing to
overreach, develop similar levels of angst in the listener.
Every bit of the strain on that mercilessly taut tether has
managed to express itself through lead singer Matt Berninger’s remarkable,
resonant voice. As technology and
instant information continue to sequester each of us in perfect cloisters of
our own divining, The National, that voice, and their meditative songs have
managed—now, again, and all the way through latest album Trouble Will Find Me—to create the music of an era.
Everyone has a slideshow of life-in-progress now; everyone
has an expansive portable music collection; almost everyone goes to yoga. We have arrived at the age of the Great Self,
Alone, with all associated rapture and treachery. Life has become a vast internal meditation. Within this still, dark and expansive
headspace (it can feel at times like a chilled boat ride across the Styx,) the
National and their penchant for paced, captivating chant have thrived. There is no other music like this being made
by anyone, anywhere; funny thing, that, because these songs seems to exist
within all of us.
It doesn’t take the band long, this time out, to get it
exactly right, again. Trouble Will Find Me begins with “I
Should Live In Salt,” and the age-old National techniques reappear with
familiar warmth and bracing chill. The stately
rhythm guitar and murmuring lead—a little bit “Sweetness Follows,” a little bit
“E-bow the Letter”—command nervous attention. A characteristic chant-like recital of
non-sequiturs follows (“It takes me too much time;” “You’re not that much like
me;” “Can’t you write it on a wall?”) each accompanied by the reminder “You
should know me better than that.”
Of course you should; or, of course it feels like you
should. Because each of us in this era
knows ourselves better than any of us, or our predecessors, ever knew
themselves before. Or at least, it feels
that way. Just look at our profiles and
listen to our playlists. You should know
us better than that.
The auto-iconography shows up again in track 2 “Demons,” and
once more the vehicle is a deliberate, repetitive and gorgeous rhythm track. The narrator:
“I am secretly in love with / everyone that I grew up with.” There is personalized doom and regret from
wall to wall. “The sudden sinking feeling of a man about to fly.” “Never kept me up before / now I’ve been
awake for days.” Two tracks in, and it
feels like we are bearing down on the equivalent of Dante’s innermost circle of
personal hell. Confined to one mind (“I
stay down with my Demons,” is the actual refrain,) the results are a National-specific
glowing meld of despair and exaltation.
All of it arrives complements of the band’s masterful
tendency to keep the nuts and bolts of their songs humble, low, and
mesmerizingly subtle (if also perfectly recorded and produced.) Tracks roll on for minutes with few-to-zero
eyebrow-raising shifts in tempo or volume.
The effect is of a prolonged descent to a very deep ocean floor. “Do my crying underwater,” goes “Demons.” “And I can’t get down any further / All my
drowning friends can see.”
And what, then, of the final grand catastrophe of the
self-contained? What about falling in
love? As brushes with ecstasy go, it
isn’t the prettiest. The delicate guitar
and piano lines of “Fireproof” prep the listener for what is coming, or maybe
for the explanation of what has already happened. “You keep a lot of secrets, and I keep none /
wish I could go back and keep some.”
Trust and emotional release are not the realities of this
landscape. Further along in “Fireproof”
we have more shades of peak-era R.E.M.:
“You’re a needle in the hay / You’re the water at the door / You’re a
million miles away / It doesn’t matter any more.” There is loss everywhere throughout Trouble Will Find Me, the broken
remnants of ties that the Great Self tried halfheartedly to construct, and went
back later to inspect in the aftermath of fated dissolution.
The companion piece to “Fireproof,” and the loveliest song
on Trouble Will Find Me, is
“Slipped,” once again written in ashes.
“I’m in the city you hated,” the narrator sings, again remembering, this
time over a breathtaking, solemn piano.
The first lines of both verses are nominally about her, but really the
remainder of the song is about the narrator,
I’m having
trouble inside my skin,
I try to
keep my skeletons in,
I’ll be a
friend and a fuck-up and everything,
But I’ll
never be anything you ever want me to be
Thanks for asking, though.
All of these songs sound like they could go on forever, which
is not to say that they do not enthrall.
First, there is such personal hazard and intensity inherent in both
sound and lyric that the repetition rivets rather than bores. The second pertinent thing about the
National’s technique of chant-building is this:
the smallest musical variants—a new isolated woodwind; a falsetto choral
effect; a well-placed chord change or the coming or going of drums—can raise
the effect of a wildflower in a lava field.
This was a technique introduced on High
Violet, and perfected this time around.
Never have such low-amplitude songs sounded so interesting.
(The only two quibbles with this album: 1) the last movement of “Heavenfaced” rhymes
incessantly in the distracting cat/hat tradition of Dr. Seuss, and 2) when one
takes stock of how much loss has already occurred in so many of these songs, it
seems a bit off that the album title is in the future tense. That last quibble was actually just kidding.)
The emotional and technical effort and attention to detail
contained within Trouble Will Find Me
must surely be staggering, because the results sound effortless. The album sounds half-a-lifetime wiser, but
maybe only two weeks older, than 2010’s High
Violet. It is a streak of seamless
excellence that recalls the rapid, spellbinding transition from stunning Out of Time to life-altering Automatic For the People, or OK Computer to Kid A. Melodies are so
natural as to seem inevitable; lyrics match the songs like vines on the walls
of old churches.
Indeed, when we begin to contemplate the historical stature
of High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me, we find that the past
company the National now rightly keep is daunting in its combined timeline of impact: the Smiths of 1984-1987 (basically the band’s
entire career;) R.E.M. of 1987-1997 (Document
to New Adventures in Hi-Fi;)
Radiohead of 1997-2007 (OK Computer
to In Rainbows.) This is an entire history of indie
music. The National have been running
with the baton since 2007’s Boxer. They are still running, in strides of aweing
grace.
Zero-gravity training for would-be astronauts involves
flying an empty airliner to altitude in a hugely elongate parabola; the final
seconds of the ascent and the first seconds of the descent are so subtle as to
make the apogee a prolonged experience in weightlessness. The National are up there now, floating. For how long we do not know. But for a while now, the best band in the
world.
Keepers: 1-13
May 2013
