The National

This week I had trouble thinking about what to write. The Girl and I have been watching The Good Wife round the clock and been doing little else. So deep is our obsession with the legal drama, I’ve taken to crying ‘objection your honour’ to the criticisms she casts against my beard and toe-nails, only to be disappointed when a judge isn’t there to call ‘sustained.’ I thought it wouldn’t be a problem though finding something to review because my friend Andy had recommended me a book that I intended to read. Last week I read one of Andy’s recommendations, Remains of the Day, which was both absorbing and utterly moving. This weekend I tried his other one, Dave Eggers' The Circle, which I didn't get on with. I like Eggers too: his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius memoir is as funny as the title suggests. The Circle though suffers from being of a particular time. Its satire on technology would have felt prescient in 2013, but now in 2017 feels passé. The book looks at how community has been co-opted by the internet to mean faceless, vacuous interaction. It challenges the deification of data, highlighting how online users chase approval ratings in the form of re-tweets and likes. 4 years later all of this has come to pass, meaning that Eggers’ sci-fi is now non-fiction. I put the book down after 150 pages.

This woman's life now seems intertwined with mine.

So I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I’ve been enjoying The Handmaid’s Tale on Channel 4, but don’t feel I’ve seen enough to pass comment. I liked Richard Ayoade on The Crystal Maze re-boot, yet not enough to write an essay about it. I found myself in a quandary. I though about taking a week off, maybe having Stewart Lee fill in for me, like he does for David Mitchell in The Observer. Then on the TV listings I saw what I was going to write about. There on BBC 4 at 8pm were my favourite band: The National. As part of BBC’s Glastonbury coverage, they would be showing the Ohioan rockers’ performance on The Pyramid Stage.

Ayoade was great on The Crystal Maze.

 

I’ve been a fan of The National ever since my mate Jim did a compilation album for me way back in ’08. Being somewhat of a maverick when it came to mix-tapes, Jim put two tracks from the same artist – I know, it’s the kind of outlaw spirit that means he’s now training to be a school counsellor. After listening to ‘All The Wine’ and ‘Fake Empire,’ I pretty much went out and bought the whole of the band’s back catalogue. It’s not often in life where you see, hear or read something that you think was designed with you in mind. But with The National I knew that I had found my band. Listening to a lot of podcasts these days, The National along with Arctic Monkeys, are the only bands that I religiously follow. As a student I would go to gigs every week. During my twenties I bought music regularly; my CD rack standing as a symbol of defiance against a digital age. But now I don’t listen to much music. I still love how an apt song choice can elevate a scene in a movie. I still get emotional at how something so ubiquitous like a tune can be so personal to a couple at a wedding. I haven’t left music, but I feel that we’re on a break at the moment. I’m sure in years to come I’ll lay supine once more, scrutinising lyrics whilst a disc – yes, an actual physical thing – spins nearby.

I'm sure the adults of Shoreditch are late to work making these.

As it is, it’s The National and Arctic Monkeys that I look out for. Being a student of English, lyrics mean a lot to me. Matt Berninger and Alex Turner are respectively, in my mind, today’s great lyricists. (Feel free to post your favourite lyricists; I'm always on the lookout.) In five minutes both fashion the kind of character studies many novelists only dream of. The fact that they do it with a form that demands an economy of language makes them even more compelling. For all the preternatural talent of Turner, Berninger for me is the superior craftsman. Turner can do to portraiture but, unlike his peer, can't do landscape. In my favourite song of The National’s ‘The Geese of Beverly Road,’ Berninger tells a story of a pair of young lovers setting off car alarms for lols. The closing refrain of ‘Come be my waitress and serve me tonight. Serve me the sky tonight. Oh come. Serve me the sky with a big slice of lemon’ is spellbindingly beautiful. Romanticised yearning under a citrus skyline. Is there anything more evocative than that?

The reason The National were playing last night is because they’re back with a new album, Sleep Well Beast. The National have been a band on the rise for a while now: like Pulp, Blur and Elbow it took them a while to find popularity. For a few years they were in the margins on an Indie scene – that’s pretty niche. With the release of third album Alligator though, they began to generate some broadsheet buzz. To date, this is my favourite album; although for many, it’s their successor Boxer, a swooning distillation of mature songwriting. Each album since has led to incremental growth, which is why they now find themselves second to Foo Fighters on the main bill.

The Ohioans open with ‘Sea of Love,’ a cautionary tale about diving headfirst into romantic-infested waters. The protagonist of the tune is in too deep and is fading into the abyss. Meanwhile, the narrator who has destabilised the lover is left opining, ‘I see you rushing now. What did Harvard teach you?’ It appears when it comes to love it really does make fools of us all. Next is ‘Fake Empire,’ the band’s calling card. When Obama was running for Office in 2008, the song soundtracked his candidacy, being played at rallies from Seattle to Miami. It has to be one of the most gorgeous things ever put to recorded music. The piano forms a beautiful backdrop to the scene, providing a wistful vista for Berninger to paint his lyrics. Lyrics as rich as, ‘Tiptoe through our shiny city with our diamond slippers on. Do a gay ballet on ice. We’re half-awake in a Fake Empire.’ Even though the first half of these words point to elegance and finesse, the second half warn of stupefaction. It appears their city’s smile is at the expense of another country’s misery. 'Fake Empire' wasn’t so much a pro-Obama song, but an anti-Bush one, admonishing a nation that had put self-interest over world preservation. When the drums kick in, signalling the line ‘it’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky,’ images of 9/11 and Baghdad bombing spring to mind. It’s four minutes encompasses the brilliance of a band that do both rich poeticism and pummelling ire.

After these tunes, the band play four songs from their album. The first I was familiar with, the widescreen ‘The System Only Dreams in Darkness.’ It is one where the lead guitar flickers in and out like a tele on the blink, eventually coming into colour late on with a resurgent solo. After is ‘Walk it Back,’ a synth-laden tune that has Berninger challenging his own inertia. The song is punctuated by a sample of Karl Rove, George Bush’s senior consultant: 

'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.' 

It appears that America’s Fake Empire is still a concern to a band that have been vehemently opposed to Donald Trump. ‘Guilty Party’ is another new one: a mournful dissection of a relationship in crisis. Berninger sings he knows he’s ‘no holiday,’ understanding why his love is in turmoil. Towards the end, catharsis is found when the vocals cede to guitar and brass, meditating perhaps on how limited words are. 'Day I Die' is a newbie that seems to sport a riff that's been plagiarised from an ice cream van. Never has a song about death seemed so upbeat.

Matt Berninger. (Courtesy of Getty Images)

Much of the rest of the set is old favourites like the elegiac ‘England’ and the propulsive ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio.’ At this point, Berninger’s inhibitions have gone the same way as his wine bottle... hurtling to the floor. Whereas earlier, he strikes a statuesque frame at the mic stand, by the end he’s a tourettic ball of rage. When he launches into ‘Mr November’ he paces the stage like a man that’s lost all his coordinates. There’s bellows, screams, yelps, hisses. His angel voice has been possessed by sinister forces, exorcism can only be found in shouting the devil dry. Finally, they end on another new one ‘Turtleneck’ that feels like something of a departure. The band either do mournful waltzes or splenetic charges, this though feels a little like Franz Ferdinand being sacrificed at the altar of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. (Is that the kind of description that can get me onto the NME staff team?)

In a week where I thought I would have nothing to write about, I found The National. Not just a band to save your blog, but a band to enrich your life.

The set is available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p05596b0/glastonbury-2017-the-national