Political Asides - Not giving up on The National
"Man," I cried, "how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom! Cease, you know not what it is you say."
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
"I'll still destroy you some day ... Sleep well, beast!"
"You as well, beast!"
- The National, 'Sleep Well Beast'
A new National album should really have had me salivating. At the time of the release of Trouble Will Find Me - was it really almost five years ago? - I'd declared them my favourite 'still together' band in the world. But with the September release of Sleep Well Beast, and to my slightly guilty surprise, I could barely summon a shrug. What had happened? Well, it wasn't so much the music. Despite its irritatingly gnomic title, lead single 'The System Only Dreams in Darkness' proved to be a real grower with its double chorus and urgent dabs of minimalist guitar. The problem seemed to be that I'd grown out of The National. Lead singer Matt Berninger's perennial theme of twenty-something angst was all well and good if you were a twenty-something - or at a push a thirty-something who was finding it hard to accept their fourth decade - but for someone suddenly closer to fifty rather than forty, it was inexcusable.
But on giving it a couple of back-to-back plays, including a complete run through whilst walking back to a Copenhagen hotel after spending a melancholy hour at the Danish National Gallery gazing at the mesmerizing paintings of Vilhelm Hammershoi - an artist whose work curiously complements the band - I realised that I had been short-changing them.
This low-key epiphany came about around halfway through the song 'Walk It Back'. It's both a typical National song and an atypical one. Typical in what Matt is singing of, a half-muttered grouch about 'always fucking things up', and atypical in its inclusion of a snatch of incongruous dialogue that, nevertheless, ends up reframing the entire song. These words, apparently uttered in a non-public meeting by George W Bush's chief political adviser Karl Rove back in 2007, are quietly chilling.
'Walk it Back' and its toxic political aside might only last a couple of seconds but it does feel like something different has been added into the mix. And, indeed, countless reviews of the album do find in it something much more worthy of a forty-six year old. Alexis Petridis in The Guardian describes it as a concept album, going on to state that "virtually every song on Sleep Well Beast concerns itself with the bleak minutiae of middle age: feelings of regret, relationships becoming careworn and - especially - unignorable cracks appearing in a marriage."
Gradually the songs have crept up on me; a more mature theme creeping in, dignified in the way that they seem to suggest that occasional undignified behaviour is an inevitable result of middle-age. Eventually, you'll need to give up on it. Maybe not just yet, though.
So, a little bit different, but not too different. It's still brimming with wonderfully abstruse yet striking Berninger lyrics such as the reference to a poet's suicide in 'Carin At The Liquor Store': "I wasn't a catch, I wasn't a keeper ... I was walking around like I was the one who found dead John Cheever." And in 'Guilty Party', a beautiful, slow-burn of a track, The National may have just unleashed the best song ever about the slow, decay of a long relationship. It's not quite my album of 2017, but it might just get there before January is out.
My Top Five National Moments
If you're new to The National, and you're intrigued, why not give them a spin. If you're not new, beware, this list is rather an obvious one.
(1) 'Fake Empire': The most romantic song ever written? Indeed, can a song that features trombones be considered romantic? Oh yes! On my wedding day I will insist that it's the first dance. Put a little something in your lemonade.
(2) 'Bloodbuzz Ohio': In Bryan Devendorf The National have the most incredible drummer. Listen to the way that his drums completely drive this song, an incredible ode to drunkenly humiliating yourself in front of the one that you love. Never a good idea. Unless you're going to write a killer song about it.
(3) 'About Today': Pour yourself a whisky, add a drop of ice, sit back and wallow. The National are great to wallow with.
(4) 'Slow Show': There's a lot of drinking in The National's songs. Here we find Matt, at a party or a wedding standing next to a punch-bowl, full of his trademark self-pity. But he shrugs it all off and manages to come up with the most magnificently romantic coda: "You know I dreamed about you ... for twenty-nine years before I saw you."
(5) 'Terrible Love': The grand, Gothic opener to The National's greatest album High Violet. Follow that femme fatale down the rabbit hole at your peril.
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
"I'll still destroy you some day ... Sleep well, beast!"
"You as well, beast!"
- The National, 'Sleep Well Beast'
A new National album should really have had me salivating. At the time of the release of Trouble Will Find Me - was it really almost five years ago? - I'd declared them my favourite 'still together' band in the world. But with the September release of Sleep Well Beast, and to my slightly guilty surprise, I could barely summon a shrug. What had happened? Well, it wasn't so much the music. Despite its irritatingly gnomic title, lead single 'The System Only Dreams in Darkness' proved to be a real grower with its double chorus and urgent dabs of minimalist guitar. The problem seemed to be that I'd grown out of The National. Lead singer Matt Berninger's perennial theme of twenty-something angst was all well and good if you were a twenty-something - or at a push a thirty-something who was finding it hard to accept their fourth decade - but for someone suddenly closer to fifty rather than forty, it was inexcusable.
 |
| The album cover of Sleep Well Beast |
But on giving it a couple of back-to-back plays, including a complete run through whilst walking back to a Copenhagen hotel after spending a melancholy hour at the Danish National Gallery gazing at the mesmerizing paintings of Vilhelm Hammershoi - an artist whose work curiously complements the band - I realised that I had been short-changing them.
 |
| Hammershoi - Ida Hammershøi, the artist's wife, with a teacup (1907) |
This low-key epiphany came about around halfway through the song 'Walk It Back'. It's both a typical National song and an atypical one. Typical in what Matt is singing of, a half-muttered grouch about 'always fucking things up', and atypical in its inclusion of a snatch of incongruous dialogue that, nevertheless, ends up reframing the entire song. These words, apparently uttered in a non-public meeting by George W Bush's chief political adviser Karl Rove back in 2007, are quietly chilling.
"People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are 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."
For myself, their inclusion in the song are a necessary counterweight to the solipsism of the singer, one who is 'always thinking about useless things', and whose refusal to engage in the wider world through a combination of impotence and lack of interest, allows the Karl Roves of the planet to enact their self-serving plans. And in including them, it juxtaposes the political sphere with Berninger's world-weary, never-ending self-analysis, an ironic nod, perhaps, to the listener that seems to say 'Hey, I know that the world is collapsing as I carry on gazing at my navel, but do forgive me.' And after giving the album a few more plays I was ready to do just that, not least because of the way that it forces you to hone in on that quote.
And it is an astonishing quote, elegant, apposite and sinister. Karl Rove himself has denied, on numerous occasions, that he is responsible for these words, most recently when asked by the online music magazine Quietus for a review of the song. Clearly he won't be following up his role as Dubya's oily Svengali with a career as a music journalist:
 |
| Karl Rove channeling some hubris |
And it is an astonishing quote, elegant, apposite and sinister. Karl Rove himself has denied, on numerous occasions, that he is responsible for these words, most recently when asked by the online music magazine Quietus for a review of the song. Clearly he won't be following up his role as Dubya's oily Svengali with a career as a music journalist:
"Off the record: starts with a Euro Tech Pop thing and transition into a more peppy tune that's easier to dance to ... Suspect it won't make Casey Kasem's Top 40."
Lester Bangs, it ain't. But he did at least try. Which, in turn, makes me think that Rove is quite pleased with being associated with the quote. Why even bother responding to these accusations over and over again, and certainly when they come from a rarely read, cult online music publication? And we'll certainly know that this is the case if he responds to this blog post.
Initially, I also felt that the quote had the air of that other maligned soundbite from the Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld's 'unknown unknowns'. Both of these statements seemingly open their 'authors' up to ridicule, but after dimming any partisan prejudice that you might carry, they suddenly light up, elegant and cutting, laser-like, right to the core of the times that we are living in. It's as if Rove - and I do sincerely believe it be Rove - has predicted 'fake news' a decade before its domination of the geopolitical landscape. Indeed, the quote rings true, brutally so.
Yet something is missing. At the core of Karl Rove's musings is the idea of him and his fellow Neocons being in control of what they had created. "When we act, we create our own reality." Dubya was the populist puppet and they pulled the strings. Not for long though. The Republican monster breaks free from Rove, an overreaching Victor Frankenstein, and now runs amok. Is it any wonder that Matt Berninger feels that impotency and a failure to engage with the wider world are the only possible response.
Initially, I also felt that the quote had the air of that other maligned soundbite from the Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld's 'unknown unknowns'. Both of these statements seemingly open their 'authors' up to ridicule, but after dimming any partisan prejudice that you might carry, they suddenly light up, elegant and cutting, laser-like, right to the core of the times that we are living in. It's as if Rove - and I do sincerely believe it be Rove - has predicted 'fake news' a decade before its domination of the geopolitical landscape. Indeed, the quote rings true, brutally so.
Yet something is missing. At the core of Karl Rove's musings is the idea of him and his fellow Neocons being in control of what they had created. "When we act, we create our own reality." Dubya was the populist puppet and they pulled the strings. Not for long though. The Republican monster breaks free from Rove, an overreaching Victor Frankenstein, and now runs amok. Is it any wonder that Matt Berninger feels that impotency and a failure to engage with the wider world are the only possible response.
 |
| "Invention, it must humbly be admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos." (Mary Shelley) |
'Walk it Back' and its toxic political aside might only last a couple of seconds but it does feel like something different has been added into the mix. And, indeed, countless reviews of the album do find in it something much more worthy of a forty-six year old. Alexis Petridis in The Guardian describes it as a concept album, going on to state that "virtually every song on Sleep Well Beast concerns itself with the bleak minutiae of middle age: feelings of regret, relationships becoming careworn and - especially - unignorable cracks appearing in a marriage."
 |
| "And if you want to see me cry, play Let It Be or Nevermind!" |
Gradually the songs have crept up on me; a more mature theme creeping in, dignified in the way that they seem to suggest that occasional undignified behaviour is an inevitable result of middle-age. Eventually, you'll need to give up on it. Maybe not just yet, though.
So, a little bit different, but not too different. It's still brimming with wonderfully abstruse yet striking Berninger lyrics such as the reference to a poet's suicide in 'Carin At The Liquor Store': "I wasn't a catch, I wasn't a keeper ... I was walking around like I was the one who found dead John Cheever." And in 'Guilty Party', a beautiful, slow-burn of a track, The National may have just unleashed the best song ever about the slow, decay of a long relationship. It's not quite my album of 2017, but it might just get there before January is out.
My Top Five National Moments
If you're new to The National, and you're intrigued, why not give them a spin. If you're not new, beware, this list is rather an obvious one.
(1) 'Fake Empire': The most romantic song ever written? Indeed, can a song that features trombones be considered romantic? Oh yes! On my wedding day I will insist that it's the first dance. Put a little something in your lemonade.
(2) 'Bloodbuzz Ohio': In Bryan Devendorf The National have the most incredible drummer. Listen to the way that his drums completely drive this song, an incredible ode to drunkenly humiliating yourself in front of the one that you love. Never a good idea. Unless you're going to write a killer song about it.
(3) 'About Today': Pour yourself a whisky, add a drop of ice, sit back and wallow. The National are great to wallow with.
(4) 'Slow Show': There's a lot of drinking in The National's songs. Here we find Matt, at a party or a wedding standing next to a punch-bowl, full of his trademark self-pity. But he shrugs it all off and manages to come up with the most magnificently romantic coda: "You know I dreamed about you ... for twenty-nine years before I saw you."
(5) 'Terrible Love': The grand, Gothic opener to The National's greatest album High Violet. Follow that femme fatale down the rabbit hole at your peril.
Comments
Post a Comment