The Great American Novel

I can't wait for the new National album, which you can preview here. (If you're expecting genius, listen to Bloodbuzz Ohio). These guys see America as it is:

It was supposed to be the National’s moment. After years of mostly anonymous struggle, the National’s two previous albums, “Alligator” (2005) and “Boxer” (2007), were so full of strangely isolated songs about friendship, romance and work that they had created for this new release the sort of expectant critical murmur that has been rare to hear since the end of the age of record shops. “Alligator” and “Boxer” did what excellent rock ’n’ roll albums did in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s: transcended the sum of their singles to offer something larger. In the National’s case, it was a powerful, probing feeling for the inner lives of average people out in the American heartland. So good was the music that with it came the promise of what might follow, the heady potential that the National would soon take things one step further, go ahead and make the great Middle American novel as music, an album for our time.

[...]

With the National, it’s never only rock ’n’ roll. Watching them record a song is like looking on as a group of skilled chefs make a sandwich together; even in a B.L.T., they can foresee endless possibilities. They are now five men in their mid- to late 30s, with mortgages, children, wives or serious girlfriends and musical tastes that have likewise settled into convictions. Each National song is a microbatch creation integrating their obsessive, often-diverging feelings about rock ’n’ roll. These range from the formally inventive, high-art aspirations of Bryce to the garage-band purism of Matt, who, Aaron says, “is all about if there’s heart or purpose in it. He has no interest if it’s theoretical.” By striving to accommodate these disparate points of view, the National gets what all bands want and few achieve, a sound of its own. Michael Stipe, the lead singer of R.E.M., told me that when he took Mike Mills, R.E.M.’s bass player, to hear the National perform in London, it took Mills only half of one song to exclaim, “This is the most amazing thing I’ve heard in years.” Stipe explains: “It’s instantaneous. It touches you.”

THE NATIONAL SOUND has a layered, seductive quality that is filled with intimate male feeling and uneasy cinematic portent: a storm coming up outside the window; leaves blowing in the road. It’s distinctive music born of an apparent limitation — Matt’s voice. His is a classic baritone with a resonant, melancholy timbre, but it lacks range and tonal variation; Matt often half-talks his vocals in the style of singers like Tom Waits and Nick Cave. Over the years, the band’s solution has been to create shifting instrumental shapes and colors just beneath the vocals. The twins’ signature is a hocketing guitar line, their instruments chiming in and out, mirroring each other as they share the melody. All the intersecting sounds mesh with Matt’s voice in a way that seems to deepen his texture, and with repeated listening the songs achieve emotional intensity. In part this is because the drums are given unusual prominence. A very good drummer controls the beat; a better one defines it. When Bryan’s cymbals splash in a song about a rainy-day loss of faith, you don’t just hear the water; you see a thousand dead umbrellas. Since Matt excels at writing about sensitive people whose lives slump within that chapfallen key, the result is songs that are rich with mood, slow-cooked all the way down. [Emphasis mine.]

Every word is true. There is nothing like it. (OK, maybe Springsteen, but not since the 80s.) Boxer and Alligator are religion. Of course, what do you expect from Midwestern expatriate Gen-Xers?

Update: Musically, very good. Viscerally, though, it falls short of Alligator and Boxer. I'll have to see how it wears with repeated listening.