The National’s songs embrace a frame of mind that may be more familiar from movies than from daily life: a bleary urban predawn in which a deadpan antihero drifts among alienation and yearning, cynicism and vulnerability. “You were always weird, but I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now,” Matt Berninger sings in his resigned, morose baritone. “Walk away now and you’re gonna start a war.”
Ominous ambiguity fills the National’s fifth album, “Boxer.” In “Brainy,” Mr. Berninger sings, “Think I’d better follow you around/You might need me more than you think you will.” He could be a guardian or a stalker, but behind him, the music rises reassuringly, switching from a dark minor-key verse to major-key affirmations.
The National got started in Cincinnati before moving to Brooklyn, but its music looks toward Britain. With a steady eighth-note pulse, uninflected drumbeats and layers of guitars entwined around Mr. Berninger’s midtempo melodies, its song structures revive the 1980s mope-rock of New Order and the Cure. Yet the National’s songs aren’t aimed at clubland; they’re elaborated with orchestral brasses and strings that make them weightier and more inward-looking, dissolving 1980s nostalgia in the music’s sheer intricacy.
There are verbal nuggets throughout the album — “You get mistaken for strangers by your own friends” — but it’s not the antihero sentiments that make the songs memorable; it’s the methodical yet obsessive patterns that frame them.
The National is to play five sold-out shows May 28 to June 1 at the Bowery Ballroom.
Aug 17 at South Street Seaport, NYC
-JON PARELES
2007 has been an amazing year for records so far - and we haven’t even reached Summer yet. As well as stunning turns by Von Sudenfed, Dinosaur Jr and Dalek we’ve had three stone cold classics in the form of ‘Sound of Silver’, ‘The Magic Position’ and now this. Battles, for the uninitiated, are a four piece featuring ex-Helmet sticksman John Stanier, multi-instrumentalist Ty Braxton, former Don Caballero guitarist and keyboardist Ian Williams and Dave Konopka from Lynx. They caused something of a stir a year or so ago when Warp gave their first two EPs a licensed release in the UK and they came over for a number of gigs including an amazing turn at Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival. But if people had them pinned down as math rock experimentalists (an incorrect assumption even then) this album visibly dispels that myth immediately. From the opener ‘Race: In’ this album is a sunburst of ideas and styles, presumably painstakingly written, and fairly difficult to play but never anything less than instantaneously accessible. The set up works like this: John hammers out the kind of jazz and metal inflected breaks that work as a focal point for the rest of the band, who evolve and devolve loops all around him. Trilling and thrilling themes ebb and flow, keyboard riffs ape guitars which in turn ape processed vocal loops. Amazingly this is actually how they sound live as well, at any one point during a track by Battles up to eight instruments (vox included) are being played by four people. The most astounding track on an astounding album is the aptly titled ‘Atlas’, which is a conceptual joke of sorts. The Helmet vet travels regularly to see his girlfriend in Cologne where the DJs had grown really sick of the minimalist Kompact scene and started hanging out in rock clubs before transferring their own lolloping Glitter beat to techno tunes to create shcaffel; the sound that would eventually influence Goldfrapp and Rachel Stevens. Battles thought it would be funny to cover the techno as a rock band and see what the results would be like. They were, of course, phenomenal. Elsewhere the symphonic prog pop of The Cardiacs informs on ‘Ddiamondd’; the sumptuous horror-show of ‘Rembrandt Pussy Horse’-era Buttholes on the creepy ‘Leyendecker’ and the twitchy jazz rock of ‘Tij’. This is not just an album that can be appreciated by fans of the avant-garde, pop and rock alike but a genuine fuck you to the people claiming modern music has nowhere left to go. Essential. John Doran
