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thenationalreview: The National Trouble Will Find Me 4AD;...

Tue, 21 May 2013 22:37:19 -0400

The National

Trouble Will Find Me

4AD; 2013

By Ian Cohen; May 21, 2013

Most people attribute the National’s escalating popularity to their reliability: They write songs about existential dread and the real pressures that result when others are depending on you to have your shit together. And while that steadiness is certainly important, it gives short shrift to how the Brooklyn-via-Cincinnati band’s career fulfills a fantasy. Though their self-titled 2001 debut is all but written out of their history, every National album since has been more ambitious, accomplished, and successful than the one that came before it. They are strivers, and their place in the indie rock world suggests that life can be a series of upward promotions and self-improvement. But hard work is often a cover for repressed frustration, as was clear on 2010’s High Violet, an album whose wrought arrangements and violent lyrics underscored every story about what a tremendous pain in the ass it was to make. The question they ask on Trouble Will Find Me is both relatable and fantastical: When do we get a break from shooting up the ladder?

The National may find it impossible ever to relax, but they have learned to stop struggling on Trouble Will Find Me, their leanest and most aerodynamic record yet. Most descriptors of the National’s musicianship— the exacting performances, Matt Berninger’s oaken baritone, the allegiances with the equally finicky St. Vincent and Sufjan Stevens— can double as evidence for self-serving arguments about how they’re “boring.” The only term that’s dogged the National more than that one is “grower,” a slightly backhanded remark implying that enjoying them requires an inordinate investment, or that it’s more cerebral than physical. While the National never lacked confidence or craft, Trouble is an easily accessible and self-assured work, largely because it focuses on the visceral power of Berninger’s vocals and Bryan Devendorf’s inventive drumming. It’s a sign of trust that they can convey all of their ornate and rich melancholy without every sad note being underlined by a bassoon.

It’s been eight years since Berninger screamed on record, and now that act appears to have served as some kind of exfoliant. (He also quit smoking in 2011.) His vocals are deeper and richer than ever, as well as more tuneful and elegant. The National’s dirty secret is that for all of the Dessner brothers’ orchestral ambitions, these songs are simple things: Instantly memorable melodies and minimal chord progressions become familiar after one listen, and then there’s a pivot, usually undetectable the first time around, that takes the National towards one of their proprietary grand finales. The greatness lies in when the listener connects the two and realizes they’re part of the same song.

“Graceless” perfects the kind of fist-pumping victory lap featured on “Abel” or “Bloodbuzz Ohio”, and subsequent spins reveal how expertly the build is structured. Ditto for “Sea of Love”, which incrementally wells up to a cathartic call and response that extends a hand to a slipping friend with both empathy (“tell me how to reach you”) and dark humor (“what did Harvard teach you?”). There are plenty of great little moments as well; the fractious time signatures of “I Should Live In Salt” and “Demons” pushing against Berninger’s burly vocals, a tiny, chromatic guitar figure setting “Humiliation” on a new trajectory, “I Need My Girl” expressing its nervy claustrophobia through frilly filigrees. You never lose sight of Trouble Will Find Me being the result of a meticulous process conducted by professionals, though like surgeons, chefs, or interior decorators, they trust themselves to know when to put the tools down.

That’s mostly true of Berninger’s lyrics as well. Trouble Will Find Me doesn’t contain his sharpest writing— in particular, “Fireproof” and “Slipped” cross over to being a bit pro forma— but in ditching the obtuse metaphors and playing with and against type, it’s his funniest. “I am secretly in love with everyone I grew up with,” he gravely intones on “Demons”, hinting at the dominant theme of how the self-image and relationships formed during his younger, angsty years figure in to his present reality. He brings the stakes down to a tangible level, where he’s invited to nice dinners, punk parties, and meet-and-greets, only to wind up calling his wife, feeling like his presence there is all somehow a giant mistake. “When I walk into a room, I do not light it up… FUCK,” Berninger stresses in an exasperated tone as a minor chord inversion takes away the mock scare quotes during the final chorus of “Demons”, revealing the deep-set despair at the source of all this self-deprecation.

As usual, he’s not alone on Trouble Will Find Me. Within this elemental music, compulsions towards substances, sex, and depression are likened to swamps, oceans, and agricultural decay— natural events tentatively contained by human will. The characters are medicated, missing, and incapable of justifying their hangovers, let alone glorifying them. On Alligator, Berninger’s sociopathic tendencies felt defiant, and some may miss that; during “All The Wine”, he drank from bottomless goblets, claiming “God is on my side.” Conversely, the narrators of Trouble Will Find Me are creatures of habit attending to dull aches; a perfunctory anti-romance is consecrated with “Tylenol and beer”, and by the next song, Berninger mutters, “God loves everybody, don’t remind me.” Where he once fancied himself a cold-blooded heat-seeker and a “birthday candle in a circle of black girls,” the isolation he now feels renders him as unique as “a white girl in a crowd of white girls in a park.”

Considering the National can no longer be compared to anyone besides themselves, it’s fitting Trouble Will Find Me is their most self-referential album. Sometimes, they’re alluding to their image as the definitive yuppie band: Berninger calls himself “a 45 percenter,” “a television version of a person with a broken heart.” They’re also putting their own work up against the canon because they’re big enough to do it: Let It Be and Nevermind serve as paragons of stability on “Don’t Swallow the Cap”, Elliott Smith’s despondent “Needle in the Hay” contrasts with the pokerfaced “Fireproof”. Bona Drag plays during the luxurious piano mope of “Pink Rabbits”, LA Woman and Guns N’ Roses are given malaprop name-checks on “Humiliation”.

Of all the references, the most powerful serves as the final line on Trouble Will Find Me: “they can all just kiss off into the air.” On a song which bemoans the futility of living in the past, here’s a band often mocked for aging with their music quoting a band often mocked for music that’s stuck in a permanent state of teenhood. It could be the funniest or the most heartbreaking moment on a record full of instances of both, a reminder that when Berninger sings “I was trying not to crack up” on the previous song, there’s two ways of reading it. On a similar topic, Ezra Koenig recently opined, “wisdom’s a gift but you’d trade it for youth,” and “Hard to Find” is a similar thought taken from a different angle. People stay down with their demons wishing for that trade to be a realistic possibility, and in the clearest terms hismedium-sized American heart can muster, Berninger expresses his means of finding serenity when trouble tries to find him— “there’s a lot that I’ve not forgotten/but I let go of other things.” As a culmination and refinement of everything the National have done over the past decade, Trouble Will Find Me couldn’t be granted a more fitting mission statement.

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Tue, 21 May 2013 08:41:14 -0400

In a sense, noise music is a lot like whiskey. This isn’t...

Wed, 08 May 2013 13:05:00 -0400

In a sense, noise music is a lot like whiskey. This isn’t a statement about the intoxicating effects of sound, nor is it a comment on the stereotype that aficionados of both pursuits are smelly and wear sweats outside. Rather, it’s an extended, sort-of-terrible metaphor about acquired tastes. While you may hear people talking about tastes of oak and smoky hints and applewood and earthiness, the first time you drink scotch your reaction is much more likely to be “OW JEEZ my throat, why do people drink this on purpose?” Similarly, noise connoisseurs might cite jazz or Krautrock influences and dance rhythms, but, at least initially, noise and drone tend to mostly sound like really loud feedback. With enough exposure to the right stuff, though, you’ll start to notice nuances, and (hopefully) develop a taste for the stuff. In that sense, then, Drone Activity In Progress was sort of like a giant scotch tasting, but for noise music.

I went to Red Bull Music Academy’s Drone Activity in Progress event in Queens and wrote about it for The Creators Project. I didn’t put this in the article, but I was extremely disappointed by the lack of free energy drinks at the event. Everything else was pretty cool.

What these guys didn’t know when they threw my camera out...

Sat, 04 May 2013 00:35:18 -0400

What these guys didn’t know when they threw my camera out of my hands, breaking it and prematurely exposing the film, is that it would make for really cool pictures.

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Fri, 03 May 2013 20:17:07 -0400

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Wed, 01 May 2013 23:04:36 -0400

Free Idea for Content

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:53:57 -0400

Tomorrow is the first of May, aka May Day, aka International Workers’ Day, a day on which we celebrate the workers of the world or whatever (I think it’s bigger in Europe?). April 1st, if you remember, was April Fools’ Day, a day on which we celebrate bad pranks. The most consistent feature of April Fools’ Day is articles about “epic” April Fools’ pranks/prank fails.

So if any of you write for one of those sites that lets you curate lists for money (and who am I kidding: we all write for those sites), here’s a possible piece of content. I’d do it myself, but, frankly, I don’t do this for the money and I’m much happier coming up with a bad concept than I am actually bringing a bad concept to fruition.

For the headline, go with something along the lines of:

10 Most Epic May Day Pranks of All Time

Then, in the body of the list, fill in some of the injustices associated with capitalism. The joke here being that May Day is akin to April Fools’ (they fall on the first day of successive months, after all), except that May Day is a celebration of all the times that the rich have “pranked” the masses. Possible pranks include Reaganomics, creating mass resentment of public-sector workers because they have benefits (as opposed to resentment of the people who’ve prevented everyone else from also having benefits), and the Vietnam War. I’m not gonna fill in all ten points for you, but don’t worry, you can paint with broad strokes. Sometimes I ask myself: Is capitalism to blame? The answer is almost always yes. Besides, it’s not like you have to actually define the events or explain how they were epic pranks. All you have to do is hyperlink to the Wikipedia entries. Or don’t link—readers can Google it themselves if they really care.

whenever I draw my grave I date it with a year that has already...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:11:17 -0400

whenever I draw my grave I date it with a year that has already passed because I feel like if I do a date that hasn’t happened yet the world might try to pull some funny business

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Sun, 21 Apr 2013 22:44:23 -0400

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Sun, 21 Apr 2013 22:43:24 -0400

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Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:27:54 -0400

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Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:20:29 -0400

Try Renting in New York!

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:18:00 -0400

“The leafier areas of Brooklyn were colonized in the last decade by brunching hordes willing to pay seven figures to live in ironic imitation of their immigrant grandparents. Even Brooklyn’s drearier northern stretches have become the territory of the 1 percent over the past five years. The first to fall was Williamsburg, a character-free, formerly working-class neighborhood now populated by bankers who pay more for the privilege of living in a gritty outer borough than they would for a place downtown. Then came nasty Greenpoint, which sits alongside a fetid, carcinogen-spewing creek. Now it’s the turn of apocalyptic Bushwick, which you should avoid visiting at all costs and where otherwise professional people pack themselves cheek-by-jowl into spaces that resemble badly administered refugee camps, but with an artisanal ramen shop next door.”

The New Republic published this piece by Jason Farago about New York real estate and, for the most part, it’s really good. A review of a new book about people’s apartments, the essay goes over what we all know: Renting in New York sucks, we’re all getting screwed, people who have been here for a long time have laughably low rents (which: good for them!), and only rich people are happy. I almost didn’t read the article though, because the first paragraph (from which the above quote is taken) set off my “no way am I going to read an article about hipsters and gentrification on a Monday morning” alarm bells. Thankfully, as it turns out, the piece almost entirely avoids these tired complaints. Still, this paragraph got me thinking about why comments about gentrification (specifically gentrification below 14th Street and in North Brooklyn) often rub me the wrong way, and it’s not because of the jokes about skinny jeans. Nor is it because I think these comments are without merit; rather, I feel like complaints about gentrification generally fail to take into account an individual’s motive for becoming a gentrifier, and almost always seem to miss the fact that gentrification—and this is not to downplay its negative effects—is just a symptom, the cause being capitalism itself.

Farago’s statements in the quoted paragraph aren’t wrong, but reading them you’d get the idea that these bankers and Senators’ sons are moving to Brooklyn for reasons other than for the simple fact that they think it’s the location that will provide them the most amount of happiness for their money. No one moves to Bushwick ironically. They move there because it’s where the people they know live and it’s near the bars and restaurants they frequent. They move there because it’s the place in their price range that is closest to the area where they’d want to live and spend their time. They believe Bushwick’s the nicest place they can afford.

I feel like I never really see anyone consider why gentrification happens. So, using New York City as an example, here’s a super broad idea of how gentrification works:

For any number of reasons, usually some combination of jobs, affordable rent, and something that can loosely be described as “culture”, the first wave of people move in. In NYC’s case, it’s the artists in the 60s, the punks in the 70s, Patti Smith, et. al. They move to places like SoHo and Greenwich Village. Once these people set up shop and become successful, the area becomes more attractive. As rents rise alongside demand, old residents are priced out of the neighborhood and newcomers move to the more affordable surrounding areas (LES, Bowery, Chelsea). As these surrounding areas get wealthier residents, new businesses open, further solidifying gentrification. Unsurprisingly, people want to move to areas where they perceive that others with similar interests live. Young people want to live near other young people. And so, as Downtown becomes too expensive, the next generation of gentrifiers moves to the next closest place: across the river to North Brooklyn, just one ride on the L or J train away. As Williamsburg (the closest neighborhood to Lower Manhattan) gets too expensive, they move east into Bushwick, north into Greenpoint, and south into Bed-Stuy.

It’s not about fashion; it’s a rational action in the pursuit of wanting to live in the “best” place one can live. To pretend otherwise is often to ignore an intrinsic (and harmful) part of our economic system in order to make a joke about kids these days.

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Sun, 14 Apr 2013 16:55:24 -0400

my favorite painting in the world

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:15:51 -0400

my favorite painting in the world

For the longest time I told myself I was ideologically opposed...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 17:45:00 -0400

For the longest time I told myself I was ideologically opposed to black and white photography. My logic was basically that the world’s in color, so you’d better have a really good reason for taking a photo in black and white. Mostly I just kind of thought black and white was cheating, because it makes everything look good, or interesting, or at least less bad. In this I guess I was like those assholes who complain about auto-tune. At a certain point I realized that a) photography isn’t real, so it’s dumb to pretend it needs to reflect the world (as an aside, I still think photojournalism should almost always be in color and nothing makes me more annoyed than black and white photos of abject poverty), and b) who cares—if you’re just trying to make something that looks nice/cool/”art”, you might as well do whatever you think will achieve that look.

Anyway, when I finally got around to buying black and white film, I figured I should do it all the way. So I bought a roll of 3200 speed film, just because it seemed like it was as far from color as I could get. This was a mistake; as it turns out, drug stores can’t process this kind of film, so I had to get it done at a professional photo place. Then I had to take the negatives to CVS to get them put onto a CD, because the professional photo place doesn’t do that sort of thing. Anyway some of the photos look cool, most of them are whatever, and I think that almost all of them would be better in color.

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Sat, 13 Apr 2013 01:42:17 -0400

Did Picasso invent punk covers?

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:51:52 -0400

Did Picasso invent punk covers?

it’s drove, Evan

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 12:56:38 -0400

it’s drove, Evan

okay but what if Tumblr was a person breaking up with you

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 13:46:00 -0400

A year ago, we did something unprecedented — we created a loving relationship of (name) and (name) assigned to cover our fear of being alone. The relationship’s mandate was to spend our free time in a thoughtful way — focusing on us, our work, and our stories. The result of this ambitious experiment was a resounding success.

After hundreds of dates and nights spent watching YouTube videos, friends ranging from James and Tom to Cynthia and Karin — not to mention a dinner party and a vacation upstate — we couldn’t be happier with our relationship’s effort. And as we continue to evolve, we’ll always be experimenting with new ways to shine light on ourselves.

What we’ve accomplished with our relationship has run its course for now, and our relationship will be closing up shop and moving on. Can you move out by Saturday? I want to personally thank you for your great work. And please join me in wishing you well.