Archive for the ‘Rock’ Category
June 5th, 2010 | 
Author: Review: U2′s latest concert epic and familiar
U2, “U2360 At The Rose Bowl” (Interscope)
U2 has been playing shows and releasing albums for more than 30 years, so even hardcore fans might honestly wonder whether they really need to buy yet another concert video showing the band playing hits like “One” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”
Out of 23 songs on “U2360,” eight are beloved classics that you can see the band play in previously released concert videos, some going all the way back to the 1980s. That’s why for anyone but a casual U2 fan, “U2360″ may sometimes feel like overly familiar territory. It doesn’t help that even some of the lighting effects used for songs like “Where The Streets Have No Name” mirror those of the band’s past concert videos.
So the major appeal of “U2360″ may rest in the viewer’s appreciation for U2′s newest material off 2009′s “No Line On The Horizon” and in the sheer spectacle of the band’s first stadium-sized stage production in the U.S. since the 1997-98 “PopMart” tour.
The album got mixed reviews, especially its leadoff single, “Get On Your Boots,” but that song and others, like its title track and “Moment of Surrender,” take on a new energy live that’s worth a listen.
Despite Bono being audibly hoarse on some songs, the concert captured on “U2360″ shows him and his bandmates well-rehearsed and in good form, especially after they loosen up a few tracks in.
The stage production — a mammoth claw-like rig festooned with a honeycomb-like, wraparound video screen — can be mesmerizing at times, and the 27 cameras used to film the show offer sweeping views and aerial shots of the more than 97,000 concertgoers.
Fans may have already seen the show if they tuned to YouTube last fall to stream it live. But the DVD, which clocks in at about two hours, delivers a far more satisfying audio and visual record.
CHECK THESE TRACKS OUT: “U2360″ includes a couple of songs that were largely absent from the band’s live set for decades and mark a welcome return here — “Ultraviolet (Light My Way),” and “The Unforgettable Fire.”
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Gogol Bordello ‘Trans-Continental Hustle’ Review
Since Super Taranta!, Gogol Bordello’s excellent 2007 breakthrough, the band has built plenty of hot anticipation for a follow-up by earning a reputation as one of rock’s most combustible live bands. Along the way, they caught the ear of goldsmith-guru Rick Rubin, who has produced their fifth album, Trans-continental Hustle.
Gogol has the kind of fiercely loyal audience that grows jealous of its beloved band, so the news of Rubin’s involvement came with both eagerness and anxiety. After all, Rubin has busied himself lately by smoothing the edges out of roots/Americana artists like Brandi Carlile, Johnny Cash, and the Avett Brothers, and some fans feared that Gogol’s full-throttle attack would go soft under Rubin’s tutelage.
However, Gogol groupies can put those fears aside for Trans-continental Hustle, remembering that Rubin is also the producer who has been on the front lines of some seriously heavy music, often moving bands further into the mainstream, yes, but without compromising their essential heaviosity. Gogol Bordello is not Slayer, but anyone who has attended a Gogol show will tell you that you’d better be ready, if not for an elbow in the ear, then at least for the ethno-clash dance party of your life. Anyone describing this band is required by federal mandate to use the phrases “gypsy punk” and “multi-ethnic”, true enough labels, but whatever you call them (Slav-rock? Ukrave? Worldcore?), Gogol Bordello gives Rubin an opportunity to shape the evolution of another band known for unbridled energy, and it’s a project that again proves the profit of such a pairing.
For the uninitiated, Gogol Bordello is a nine-piece group (counting their two female dancers) formed by singer/guitarist/songwriter/actor Eugene Hütz on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1999. They may be a New York band, but their individual members are almost all immigrants from the world over: Bassist Thomas Gobena is from Ethiopia; accordionist Yuri Lemeshev and violinist Sergey Ryabtzev were both born in Russia; percussionist Pedro Erazo is from Ecuador; guitarist Oren Kaplan is Israeli; etc.
It’s an eclectic, high-voltage ensemble, but it’s impossible to take your eyes off Ukrainian-born Hütz, the wild, shirtless, mustachioed ball of sweaty charisma who arrived in the US in 1991. Hütz’s strangled voice spits out garbled English as he prowls the stage, assaults his acoustic guitar, leans menacingly over the audience, spins in circles on one foot, and bangs on fire buckets. Violinist Ryabtzev is the Kenickie to Hütz’s Danny Zuko. He’s an elegant mover, all silver beard and jaunty beret and tasteful footwear, and his streaking violin runs provide the rocket fuel in these songs’ arrangements. Fiddler on the Roof? With this band’s mind-bending spectacle, it’s more like Fiddler on the Acid. Indeed, a GB show is part concert, part manic cabaret—a wild blend of Les Miserables, Bad Brains, Stomp!, and the craziest Russian wedding ever.
What must have attracted Rubin in the first place is the effect Gogol has on audiences, generally comprised of a mix of undergraduates, aging hippies, anarcho-punkers, costumed gypsy girls, and various facial-hair aficionados. Once the band hits the stage, though, the diversity disappears (similar to the integration onstage) into a roiling boil of flailing and moshing to such an extent that you’ll want to keep your internist on speed-dial.
While Hustle captures this kinetic fire, the new record, whether by Rubin’s influence or not, does ease the band away from the episodes of strident punk that tend to erase the band’s instrumentalists and hammer an otherwise wholly original band into ugly mook rock. Instead, Hustle focuses on the band’s true strength—blending melody and poly-rhythmic punch, coalescing cultures and styles into a common, exuberant melting-pot dance party. It is a rousing, swirling set of songs, starting with a blistering one-two punch in “Pala Tute” and “My Companjera”.
The record as a whole sounds terrific, and Rubin has done for Hütz what he’s done recently for Carlile, Neil Diamond, the Dixie Chicks, and others, which is to both spit-shine the music into sonically fresh vibrancy and to hone the artists’ songwriting chops to, in most cases, simplify toward the tightest song structures and most pleasurable melodies. “Pala Tute” kicks things off, for instance, with Hütz’s acoustic-guitar galloping alone before bashing into an accordion-and-fiddle inferno designed to blow the roof off the club, or at least your house party. The song gets increasingly frantic to the point that language will no longer suffice, giving over to Hütz’s scatting and savage “Hghyaahs!”.
“My Companjera” is even more frenetic, slamming that up-beat, with Ryabtzev firing off fiddle rides like he’s playing the friggin’ “Orange Blossom Special”. The song’s lyrics lean toward nostalgia, a new direction for Gogol and a marked difference from the fatalism that defined much of their earlier albums. Then again, Hütz’s songs aren’t easy to explicate, even when he sounds vaguely romantic, as on the (relatively) gentle “Sun Is on My Side”: ““When the sun comes up / It will be on your side. It’s a song that finds Hütz approaching conventional singing over graceful finger-picked guitar, which then gives way to a dub-inflected cadence.
Hustle hits another stride with “Rebellious Love”, crammed with chugging acoustic guitars, driving beats, whiplash guitar lines, layered backing vocals, and lines that walk a tightrope between empty and deep: “Love is running back to God/God is running after man/Men all run to the unknown”. It’s a kick to hear the fiddle and accordion team up on James Bond riffs to tango with Hütz’s hot-tar vocals. Everything is loud and insistent, but it never descends into the hardcore elements of the live show. “Immigraniada (We Comin’ Rougher)” comes the closest to scratching the itch of those who prefer Gogol’s punk edge; it’s full of jackhammer drums and full-throated chanting. The subtitle and political, rebellious tone of “Immigrandia” combine to feel like a refutation of notions that a major-label deal should necessarily temper this band’s spirit.
Elsewhere, the album depicts scenes of urban hell, full of governmental aggression, “like deleted scenes from Kafka” (good one), a landscape full of machine guns, helicopters, slums, and authorities “preparing an ethno-cleansing ride”. Still, while these songs often build to maximum urgency, the lyrics never preclude the songs’ primal propulsion, which forces you to move your body. Whether in the Brazilian strains of “Uma Menina” or the sneaky fiddle-and-bass groove that smolders for five minutes in “Raise the Knowledge” or the sing-song ska undulation of “Last One Goes to Hope”, Hustle is an album of, above all, persistent motion.
The record lags for a while in the middle but starts to pick up intensity and hooks again with “To Rise Above”, a blast of punchy existentialism (“I lay awake at night / Across my mind is one eternal fight”), and the machine-gun strumming and tongue-taxing wordplay of “In the Meantime in Pernambuco”. “Break the Spell” is another ripper of slapping drums and accordion mischief, and we can thank Rubin, one imagines, for that rock-guitar breakdown in the middle.
For all the lyrical skepticism in these songs, the music is too damned exuberant to worry too much. If anything, the relentless tempos and sheer energy of the band might wear you out before you get to the end of the hour-long record. If not, you’ll reach the title cut at the end, another bristling locomotive that relies heavily on non-word chants, as if by proving that whatever the songs are about, the express purpose of a new Gogol Bordello album is to cause people to lose control at their shows. And there’s nothing wrong with that, especially given this band’s singular achievement: combining so many world-hopping elements that the music becomes positively universal. Everybody hustle.
Jack Johnson’s ‘To the Sea’ Review
Hawaiian-born troubadour Jack Johnson has elevated beachcomber soft rock to its platonic ideal. There’s not a coconut hair out of place on his new album, “To the Sea,” which is pleasingly packaged in all recycled papers. The micro-genre chill-wave has been ascribed to such bands as Texas’ Neon Indian and Chazwick Bundick’s solo project Toro Y Moi, but it sounds like something that Johnson should be conveying with his smoothie jams.
At this point in Johnson’s career, on his fifth studio album, a listener might expect some twists in the formula, but Johnson isn’t interested in risk. Time and again, his choices are predictable, but it’s comforting and hard not to like in its gently strummed affability. His music is on permanent vacation — it should be pumped into cardiac clinics across America, lowering the blood pressure of harried patients.
Johnson is at his most schmaltzy when he grasps for profundity and misses, like on the song “Pictures of People Taking Pictures,” which repeats its title, a clichéd kernel of meta-commentary, over and over again in an unimaginative attempt to scare up some awe. He’s better off working in watery paternal mode, like when he comforts a friend — “stop upsetting yourself, upsetting your thoughts” — over a wiry calypso beat and guitar work that darkens and then brightens again. It’s the most genuine sentiment on a record from a simple but ambitious man whose real-life philanthropic and environmentally sound practices aim to sooth the world, one bro or surfer girl at a time.
The Hold Steady ‘Heaven is Whenever’ Review
At its best, the Hold Steady is a romanticized version of a great bar band: Guys resembling office clerks transformed into drunken poets who riff on Thin Lizzy, the Clash and “Rosalita”-era Bruce Springsteen.
Their rambling songs were shaped into robust anthems on their third and best album, the 2006 release “Boys and Girls in America.” It was followed up by the ambitious “Stay Positive” (2008), which put keyboards on equal footing with the guitars, and adopted a more polished, fussy production style that blunted the band’s shaggy charm.
“Heaven is Whenever” (Vagrant) tries to fine-tune the balance, reuniting the band with producer Dean Baltulonis, who worked on its first two albums. Keyboardist Franz Nicolay has departed, and singer Craig Finn, guitarist Tad Kubler, drummer Bobby Drake and bassist Galen Polivka split the difference between the previous album’s pop overtures and the guitar smackdowns of their earlier work. It adds up to another transitional effort rather than a major statement.
The characters in Finn’s sharply-turned lyrics are still obsessing over women who can only do them harm, but the boys can’t help themselves. “I’m pretty sure I wasn’t your first choice/I think I was the last one remaining,” the singer mutters on “The Weekenders.” Doomed relationships and ill-advised flings are Finn’s stock in trade, and he’s adept at parsing their intricacies.
Musically, the album is split between rockers and ruminations. It’s framed by songs thick with atmosphere and longing, the blues-tinged “The Sweet Part of the City” and the grandly orchestrated, slow-build “A Slight Discomfort.” The dream-like harmonies that float through “We Can Get Together” underpin some of Finn’s most emotive singing ever, inspired by a woman with whom he can shack up, not to make love, but to listen to records.
Kubler’s mighty riffing seizes “Soft in the Center” and evokes the staggering-drunk fist-wavers of the band’s early work. “Hurricane J” and “Our Whole Lives” try to break loose too: “We’re good guys but we can’t be good our whole lives.”
Ambition gets the best of the band on “Barely Breathing,” with horns tooting away Dixieland-style while Finn’s vocals are gussied up with psychedelic reverb. Such fussiness doesn’t suit the band; neither does the dumbed-down simplicity of the cow-bell clunker “The Smidge.”
Though better than its predecessor, “Heaven is Whenever” adds up to another awkward marriage of rock ‘n’ roll celebration and studied songcraft. Maybe they’ll get it right on the next one.
‘A French Kiss in the Chaos’ Review
Jon McClure first came to prominence as the flatmate and occasional writing partner of Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner. As the ‘Reverend’ in Reverend & The Makers McClure then had his own success with 2007 debut album, The State Of Things, which reached the top five. This follow-up is more ambitious than that inaugural effort but suffers from the same variance in quality.
For every smart couplet or cleverly constructed song structure there is a crass or naïve lyrical sentiment.
Hidden Persuaders is filled with unintentionally hilarious conspiracy theory paranoia but says nothing new. A man as politically astute as the Reverend surely read all about the perils of capitalism in Naomi Klein’s No Logo?
Long Long Time is better to begin with. All minor chord piano longing, it’s a Sheffield sibling of Primal Scream’s Cry Myself Blind until the moment that it’s spoiled by the line, ”Please don’t contact me, the river owns the battery from my phone”.
Single Silence Is Talking is far better than everything else on the album. The refrain from War’s funk classic Low Rider is given a post-Stone Roses psychedelic boost to thrilling effect, while epic, echoing guitars, a White Album-era Beatles drone and baggy Happy Mondays beats are a great accompaniment.
Another unnecessary phone reference threatens to scupper No Soap In A Dirty War. Despite this aberration the track’s sentiments are familiar to anybody with ambition: ”I don’t wanna die in the same hole I was born/ I don’t wanna get married in the same church as you all”. Musically it’s affectionate, grand and affecting, like a South Yorkshire November Rain without the pomposity.
A French Kiss In The Chaos is an accomplished indie album, produced to a high standard. If only its maker didn’t resort to hackneyed generalisations about the media having ”license to print lies as facts” and ridiculous alliteration like ”Professor Pickles prescribing me Prozac pills”.
LCD Soundsystem ‘This Is Happening’ Review
In seeming defiance of the hype that can so easily crush the potential and ambition dozens of today’s most amped up bands exude, LCD Soundsystem head honcho James Murphy has brazenly absorbed the mounting anticipation for his project’s oncoming album with what appears to be the reassuring calm of a seasoned pro. As expectations built skyward for This Is Happening, it would have been easy to feel let down—no matter how high these nine singular tracks climbed—with Murphy’s third opus, given how much has been piled onto it. What’s striking about what’s been produced is how flippantly Murphy brushes off that tension, crafting an album as spellbinding and addictive as anything he’s released in the past while taking ardent liberties with the approach he uses with his familiar-by-now manic dance-punk hysteria. Even the title itself seems to be shrugging off all of the baggage with the winking nonchalance of a prankster.
Word has it that Murphy will retire the LCD Soundsystem moniker following his latest release, and if that has any ring of truth to it, the man couldn’t have chosen a more apt bookend to this portion of his impressive career. Serving up a comprehensively postmodern survey of pop culture with wit, panache and an enviable dose of hooks, This Is Happening manages to avoid predictability by consistently keeping one step ahead of the listener yet sidestepping clever-clever irony with a genuine warmth that’s naturally layered within the giggling heathen at the heart of the record. Each curve ball that hides around the corner sneaks on as welcoming as a cool breeze on a blazing summer’s day, eliciting as many geeked out thrills as it affords mass critical adoration. What Murphy does best is balance these tendencies so that none of his whim-chasing expulsions ever feel crass or smug, and by finding the spirited inspiration in the nondescript, the self-effacement in our projected criticisms, and the fun in the commonplace, he’s able to keep us entertained in the process.
Skipping from the smart ass demeanor of “You Wanted a Hit”—its snarky, biting “you wanted a hit? / well maybe we don’t do hits” a snickering sucker-punch to the record industry—to the bittersweet, sad-eyed empathy of “All I Want”—a kissing cousin to Sound of Silver‘s Single of the Decade-worthy “All My Friends”—Murphy’s versatility is only out-matched by his ability to tie it all seamlessly into one with such a knowing, strong handed sense of craft. While lesser musicians would crumble underneath the seeming pretense of hitting on so many facets of life in such a stuttering, audacious fashion, the giddiness exhibited on these tracks is as infectious as it is admirably stitched together. In fact, that may be the resounding strength of This Is Happening: by finding a way to be life-affirming while keeping our hips shaking, without casting off life’s woes and joys as either paltry or boring, LCD Soundsystem has succeeded at capturing both our minds and our bodies without sacrificing its head-nodding spirit or its heavy-hearted sense of purpose along the way.
Not only has the band wrapped up the themes of the record with impeachable, spotless playing and production, but the man at the center of it all hasn’t lost his penchant for writing quality tunes either, as nearly anything you blind-spot off This Is Happening will prove. From the tightly-wounded yet spacey high jinks of “Drunk Girls” to the elastic, twinkling “Pow Pow,” each track is crammed with enough melodies to herald James Murphy as one of the top songwriters of his time. Touching on concepts as far-reaching as sacrificial heartache (“I Can Change”) and our hidden feelings on social etiquette (“Dance Yrself Clean”)—with no shortage of hooks, by the way—LCD Soundsystem’s excellent third release bestows us a clutch of repeatable, enduring songs that will be sure to reveal their undertow of depth as we shuffle along to its dance floor-shaking deliruim. That his songs seem sure to unravel themselves even further as among both the best and the most accessible of his time is not only a testament to his abilities as a writer and a musician, but places him on a level few of his contemporaries can lay claim to.
If we’re to place stock in the rumors at hand, and This Is Happening closes out a trilogy of DFA classics for LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy has certainly completed the circle of his tenure as King of the Indie Dance Floor with both style and smarts. The concluding record in this prospective series is not only a clattering triumph, but revels in its billowing expectations and thumbs its nose at them with the same tossed off, hook-laden attitude that informs his most remarkable moments. With their erudite yet casually dominating tertiary outing, LCD Soundsystem take their place on 2010’s shortlist of year-defining albums alongside fellow standouts Beach House and the National with a bow and a smirk. In a year splattered with high profile releases that seem to be nailing their hyped up targets more often than not (rare indeed in our culture of hopped up preemptiveness), it feels like an understatement commending the fact that not only has James Murphy overcome these lofty expectations, but that he’s created an album that may in fact go on to help surmise and define the outset of the decade in popular music as well.
Hole ‘Nobody’s Daughter’ Review
Hole’s first album in 12 years has come with the usual serving of controversy, this time incited by the fact that Courtney Love is the only original member present. The recruitment of new hands (including a Brit, Larrikin Love’s Micko Larkin), plus the bombast-loving Linda Perry as co-writer, has resulted in more polish and fewer scabrous punk moments. Love herself, though, has barely changed: still enslaved by the need to vent every emotion as it happens, she’s alternately thrilling (see the snarling, visceral Skinny Little Bitch) and tedious (quite a lot of the other tracks). Where Nobody’s Daughter hits home is when Love thinks rather than simply reacts – as on the soft, insightful Letter to God, where she miserably declares that she “never wanted to be some kind of comic relief” – and when there’s a fat, storming chorus involved (Samantha, co-written by Billy Corgan, who apparently asked Love not to use the songs they wrote together and Honey fill that bill).
Black Keys ‘Brothers’ Review
For four albums, the Black Keys’ sound was as obvious as the cover for their sixth album, Brothers: “This is an album by the Black Keys. The name of this album is Brothers.” So even after they took a (slight) left turn on 2008’s Attack & Release via a production team-up with the genre-bending Danger Mouse, even casual listeners had to know that the Keys would beat a hasty retreat to the environs of their skeletal blues-fuzz. Apart from lead single “Tighten Up,” the lone holdover from the now ceased Danger Mouse collaboration, the Keys do just that on Brothers. Produced by guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney, Brothers is the Keys’ tightest album since 2004’s Rubber Factory.
Being that the Black Keys’ sound begins with Junior Kimbrough’s skuzzy, raw take on the blues and ends with Credence Clearwater Revival, drawing lines between their catalog is an exercise in cutting the thinnest of hairs. The Keys have delivered some unimpeachable stretches on their albums (the first half of Rubber Factory, the first two-thirds of Thickfreakness, the middle third of The Big Come Up), but since Magic Potion the hit-to-OK ratio has diminished significantly. Brothers, at least through the country-western-on-acid howl of “The Only One,” doubles down on the Black Keys’ greatest strengths in a big way. There are the witchy women burners (“Next Girl,” “She’s Long Gone”), the dusty speaker exploders (“Tighten Up,” “Howlin’ For You”), all of which will surely crush festivalgoers in the near future.
The bulk of Brothers is clogged with the slower blues-ballads the band has padded its albums with since the jump (ironically, those songs hardly ever make it on the set list at the band’s concerts). Granted, those songs might put the Keys more firmly into the blues lineage they strive for, but for every Wall of Sound ditty like “Never Give You Up” there are a couple songs charging hard for treacle territory. But nothing here falls as flat as the similar songs on the band’s past two albums, particularly due to Auerbach’s improved vocal range. He is able to change his voice between delicate, bruised, ballsy and sweet, sometimes in the same song.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Brothers is that it finds The Black Keys so firmly back in their old mode after a year when they did everything they could to distance themselves from their past. Auerbach went solo and released an album that updated his sound to Neil Young and Crazy Horse rock, while Carney joined up in a jokey band made up of Ohio drummers called, of course, Drummer. Then they teamed with Damon Dash (and Jim Jones!) for Blakroc, an album that took all the songwriting pressure off Auerbach and Carney and instead put it on Mos Def and other rappers (and Jim Jones!). Brothers, meanwhile, proves that the Keys can still put a few more miles on their well-driven blues machine, regardless of what direction their non-Keys work takes them.
CocoRosie ‘Grey Oceans’ Review
Not that you’d expect anything particularly conventional from an act that apparently emerged from underneath the voluminous kaftan of Devendra Banhart back in the mid-Noughties, but of all the artists to be lumped into the “freak-folk” movement, CocoRrosie have surely turned out to be some of the freakiest.
Based between Paris and Williamsburg, New York, sisters Bianca “Coco” and Sierra “Rosie” Casady have pursued a studied sort of oddity that has entranced some just as it has bemused others – a hodgepodge of folk, blues and cabaret unafraid to mess with racial or gender roles, or toy with pastiche in its pursuit of hallucinogenic, cracked-mirror creativity.
Those who make it into Grey Oceans, the duo’s fourth album, will first have to make it past the cover – a quite horrible concoction featuring energy crystals, faux-facial hair, and some of the worst typography ever to grace a record sleeve. While amusingly grotesque, it is something of a disservice to the record within, which is largely laidback in pace and gauzy in texture, even when it tosses in jaunty ragtime piano (see Hopscotch) or moody, hip hop-inherited boom-boom-clap beats (The Moon Asked the Crow).
Whatever fripperies are erected around them, much of Grey Oceans depends on the vocals and songs of the sisters themselves. Sadly, much of these feel a little lacking. Bianca sings in a child-like coo that doesn’t totally irritate, but doesn’t really connect either, and the soporific mood that hangs over songs like Undertaker and Gallows tends to come across as a lack of focus.
What saves Grey Oceans is the occasional good idea: the Eastern-tinged Smokey Taboo mixes tablas and wilting strings with Bianca’s woozy, half-rapped vocal to impressive effect, while the very peculiar Fairy Paradise is, more or less, Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy as remixed by Paul van Dyk. The first minute or so is delicate music-box chimes and a quiet pulse of filtered synths – but then, as Bianca mutters that “trance music makes the fairies dance”, the beat drops, and the weirdest rave-up ever kicks off down the bottom of your garden.
The National ‘High Violet’ Review
If MGMT colors its musical canvas with fluorescent candy-scented magic markers, and Coldplay favors the niceness of pastel watercolors, The National’s output resembles a painstaking charcoal sketch with dramatic interplay between light and shadow. The five-piece’s cerebral rock ’n’ roll makes no apologies for its bleak emotional tenor, and I still can’t listen to their 2007 masterpiece Boxer without imagining myself slouching down the midwinter streets of Manhattan alone at 3 a.m., watching my icy breath spill into the dark like cigarette smoke. That record unfolds in a series of dramatic vignettes, populated by a cast of narrators so crippled with paranoia and insecurity they make Holden Caulfield seem positively buoyant.
The band’s new album, High Violet—which took roughly a year of intense recording at both their newly built studio space and producer Peter Katis’ Tarquin Studios in Bridgeport, Conn.—revels in the same dark hues. Late last year, frontman Matt Berninger confided to music blog Stereogum, “We started out trying to make a fun pop record. I had the word ‘HAPPINESS’ taped to my wall. We veered off that course immediately.”
Boxer’s opener, “Fake Empire,” set the tone for that album with gently syncopated piano chords that reinforced the song’s theme of blocking out the ugliness of the world by distracting oneself with cheery fantasies of bluebirds and diamond slippers. High Violet echoes that approach as opening track “Terrible Love” announces itself with a muddy guitar churn, later boasting a gorgeous series of background choral “oohs.” But as the song progresses, all signifiers of beauty are paved over with menacing guitar fuzz and clattering percussion. It’s a grim, ramshackle, singularly uninviting welcome. And the tune’s sharpened incisors leave a mark as Matt Berninger sings about insomnia: “Without a little help, it takes a while to settle down.” It’s easy to imagine this swirl of discordant noise representing the narrator’s psychological unrest—the opposite of the “rosy-minded fuzz” mentioned in Boxer single “Apartment Story.”
Still, the album opens sluggishly, especially coupled with second track “Sorrow.” When a band’s music relies this heavily on nuance, the line separating hum-along from just ho-hum narrows considerably, and it’s a credit to The National’s creative instincts that they’ve stayed mostly on the winning side of that dichotomy. High Violet is front-loaded with its two most unremarkable tracks, but despite those early missteps, it maintains that balance between light and dark shades, the balance that has defined and sustained the band’s work all along. The album eventually hits its stride with “Anyone’s Ghost,” a fun, lightly bouncing riff that features Bryan Devendorf’s most infectious drumming to date. Played live, it won’t get the crowd dancing, but it’s guaranteed to get every head in the place nodding.
Just as it’s hard to imagine Leonard Cohen rattling off a sticky pop ditty, Berninger possesses a set of a pipes divinely crafted to luxuriate in sad-bastard music. Another gift sets him apart from rock’s legions of mopey minstrels: a pitch-black sense of humor so finely tuned that even the most sullen-sounding lyrics can’t mask the rich vein of sardonic bemusement coursing just beneath the surface. Amid the insistent see-sawing groove of “Lemonworld,” Berninger sings “I gave my heart to the Army, the only sentimental thing I could think of / Cousins and cousins somewhere overseas, but it’ll take a better war to kill a college man like me.” Later, in “Conversation 16,” the narrator airs a laundry list of personal misgivings that range from mundane (“Try to hold it together till our friends are gone / … Do not want to disappoint anyone”) to flat-out bizarre (“I was afraid I’d eat your brains, ’cause I’m evil.”)
Other highlights include recent live favorite “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” which showcases one of Berninger’s signature vocal tricks—he compensates for his lack of melodic range by varying his delivery, clinging to each word a second longer than you expect before delivering the next.
Though High Violet lacks the front-to-back consistency that made Boxer such an unmitigated revelation, the new album’s peaks absolutely rival Boxer’s best tracks. The National’s unique brand of torture-chamber pop and fascination with 21st-century paranoia and psychological unrest provide an evocative thematic template; it’s not a blueprint for mainstream crossover success, but High Violet has the potential to elevate the band’s profile. If the characters Berninger creates suffer from year-round seasonal affective disorder, it’ll be interesting to see if the spotlight snaps them out of it.
