The National's High Violet - Being Serious About Being A Serious Rock Band

10 May, 2010

Music is emotional. Nothing earth shattering about that. The musical response is most often an emotional response. Only in contemporary indie rock you have to be careful about it, or else you'll be labeled 'emo.' Short for emotional, Emo has run a successful rhetorical battle through cultural iconography to bogart emotions for themselves. While many emo bands are actually quite good at constructing melodic hooks, their overemphasized seriousness actually comes off as being silly, saccharin and off-putting. There are two solid ways to beat emo. The first is to burry your seriousness underneath upbeat motifs and riffs you can dance to and feel good about at the same time. The other way is to out emote them. The National prefer the latter.

This week Brooklyn-based The National releases their long awaited 5th studio album, 'High Violet.' After receiving a fair amount of attention from 2007's 'Boxer' The National are sad-bastard music at its best. Front man Matt Berninger's voice is a combination of irony, stone faced brutality and a knack at getting to you without you being aware, reminiscent of both The Magnetic Fields' Stephen Merritt and Velvet Underground-er John Cale. Ranging from unrefined crooning to energetic bursts of momentary mania, Berninger finds an earnest tone that keeps you from questioning it's veracity.

Like their previously releases, 'High Violet.' invokes tropes common to real life, though not commonly treated (at least not well) in rock and roll. Somehow managing to pull the urgent and necessary out of the mundane, The National's characters are normal people going through the worst of times. The difficulty of subject matter is brilliantly mimicked in the complexity of the arrangements. Too unproduced to be lush, too well produced to feel accidental, the layers on each track wash over you and make you feel lost and isolated. While there is nothing in this album that hints towards triumph or resolution, there is something certainly cathartic about experience these songs.

'High Violet.' is probably one of the most highly anticipated depressing albums of the year. Like trying to run through a puddle of mud, 'Terrible Love' and 'Sorrow' stand as a checkpoint by which you have to pass, instantly reducing any excitement you may have built up for this release, bringing you down to the album's pacing. If you can listen to Berninger sing, "Sorrow found me when I was young,/ sorrow waited, sorrow won./ Sorrow that put me on the pills,/ it's in my honey, it's in my milk," and get it, get that it's simultaneously no big deal and devastating, then you may pass.