It’s not as if they’ve got magician’s fingers, the five members of pathos weavers The National, they just tend to work in your blind-spot. It’s kind of like they’ve been round to your house daily, sneaking a shiny pound coin from your wallet while you weren’t looking, until one day they arrive on your doorstep with a high yield savings account you never knew you had, a return on the half-inched deposits and the monetary means to fulfil your life’s dream. And probably a plate of cakes too (they will, of course, swear they didn’t have any). The National are the kind of band that will take one little piece of you at a time until they own you entirely, and you likely won’t notice a thing. A bit like Derren Brown without the intimidating sense of the psychological macabre.
That subconscious technique came into its own on their third album, 2005’s slow cooking dusty American classic ‘Alligator’. It came like a dream to many; accessible but surreal, normal yet with extraordinarily subtle distortions, a slow freefall through lavish textures. And it could take a good while to make sense of it all. It was always going to be a very difficult album to follow, though it’s hard to say exactly why. They shared characteristics with acts like Wilco, Sufjan Stevens, Smog, Nick Cave, REM, Magnetic Fields, Tindersticks, along with the brittle gloom of Joy Division, the creative tourettes of the Pixies, or a downtrodden Springsteen, but no facet was really overwhelming. As a unit they seemed almost apologetic in the first instance, no one member willing to be singularly remarkable. But there is an awful lot to be said for not losing your head.
This album, like the last, sources success from patience, its careful attention to detail, its willingness to listen and respond with consideration. They’re selfless musicians in that respect. Every song feels a little like someone just turned out the lights, leaving their other senses to find their feet – not in a hesitant way, that’s even less true on this very surefooted record; more cautious, curious, hopeful. Take ‘Green Gloves’, a fragile and almost one-dimensional Elliott Smith-esque finger-picking lament, that is until you revisit it over and over, appreciate the close relationship between the pirouetting guitars, the ghostly goose-bump percussion, the guarded, eloquent poetry dissipating in between the wispy layers of sound acquiring body like moss on a log, and the resultant melodies lapping like waves on a shore with gathering frequency. All of which amasses into something quietly remarkable. The direct road is not always the best road.
Having said that no member stands unduly tall, it’s perhaps truer to say that contributions are equally necessary, but the work of two is really worth singling out. Mat Beringer stays peerless as a deep-set lyricist and vocalist; abstract concepts, whimsical flourishes, humour and complex emotional aptitude pepper his definitive mumblings. And if he’s not as absurdly quotable as he was on ‘Alligator’, he’s found his optimum pitch – his weighty tone often the anchor binding down disparate instrumental strands, particularly on the likes of the tumbling, weightless ‘Racing Like A Pro’. He never once drops the ball, not for a stanza. And the maddeningly creative drums of Bryan Devendorf are an unexpected delight, behind the album’s every great success. Take the way the beat starts almost like it forgot it had to in ‘Brainy’, then setting an unflinchingly bold pace, holding court in the rattlingly tribal ‘Squalor Victoria’, making every other instrument seem like a secondary requirement, and forcing ‘Apartment Story’ into almost unwillingly becoming the most vibrant, unlikely pop song from beneath its fractured bass rumblings.
Because of its numerous breakaway peaks ‘Alligator’ remains their masterwork, just – that’s a quality that the understated discipline of this record doesn’t allow – but find fault with a moment of it if you can. It’s an album that really knows itself inside out, and it will introduce itself to you in the only way it knows how if you’d just see to let it in.
