Trouble Will Find Me
Since The National\'s 2001 debut, the world-weary baritone of frontman and songwriter Matt Berninger has become one of the most compelling voices in Brooklyn’s well-groomed indie scene, begging comparisons to darkly tempered rock outsiders like Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. The follow-up to 2010’s celebrated *High Violet* is a set of beautifully produced contemplations on shadowy love, self-destruction, and urban ennui. Chipper? Hardly. But songs like “Demons,” “Heavenfaced,” and “I Need My Girl” are impossible to shake.
In January 2012, following a twenty-two month tour to promote the band’s previous record, High Violet, guitarist Aaron Dessner returned home to Brooklyn, where the fitfulness of his newborn daughter threw Aaron into a more or less sustained fugue state—“sleepless and up all the time,” as he puts it. Punch-drunk, he shuffled into the band’s studio (situated in Aaron’s backyard), where he amused himself writing musical fragments that he then sent over to vocalist Matt Berninger. Recalls Matt of Aaron, “He’d be so tired while he was playing his guitar and working on ideas that he wouldn’t intellectualize anything. In the past, he and Aaron’s twin brother, Bryce would be reluctant to send me things that weren’t in their opinion musically interesting—which I respected, but often those would be hard for me to connect to emotionally. This time around, they sent me sketch after sketch that immediately got me on a visceral level." From beginning to end, Trouble Will Find Me possesses the effortless and unself-conscious groove of a downstream swimmer. It’s at times lush and at others austere, suffused with insomniacal preoccupations that skirt despair without succumbing to it. There are alluring melodies, and the murderously deft undercurrent supplied by the Devendorfs. There are songs that seem (for Matt anyway) overtly sentimental—among them, the Simon & Garfunkel-esque 'Fireproof', 'I Need My Girl' (with Matt’s unforgettable if throwaway reference to a party “full of punks and cannonballers”) and 'I Should Live In Salt' (which Aaron composed as a send-up to the Kinks and which Matt wrote about his brother). While a recognition of mortality looms in these numbers, they’re buoyed by a kind of emotional resoluteness—“We’ll all arrive in heaven alive”—that will surprise devotees of Matt’s customary wry fatalism. Then there are the songs that Aaron describes as “songs you could dance to—more fun, or at least The National’s version of fun.” These include 'Demons'—a mordant romp in 7/4, proof that bleakness can actually be rousing—and the haunting 'Humiliation' in which the insistent locomotion of Bryan’s snarebeat is offset by Matt’s semi-detached gallows rumination: “If I die this instant/taken from a distance/they will probably list it down among other things around town.” Finally there are songs—like 'Pink Rabbits' and the lilting 'Slipped' (the latter termed by Aaron “the kind of song we’ve always wanted to write”)—that aspire to be classics, with Orbison-like melodic geometry. In these songs, as well as in 'Heavenfaced', Matt emerges from his self-described “comfort zone of chant-rock” and glides into a sonorous high register of unexpected gorgeousness. The results are simultaneously breakthrough and oddly familiar, the culmination of an artistic journey that has led The National both to a new crest and, somehow, back to their beginnings—when, says Aaron, “our ideas would immediately click with each other. It’s free-wheeling again. The songs on one level are our most complex, and on another they’re our most simple and human. It just feels like we’ve embraced the chemistry we have.”
The National’s sixth album is their leanest and most aerodynamic, easily accessible and self-assured by virtue of focusing on the visceral power of Matt Berninger’s vocals and Bryan Devendorf’s taut, inventive drumming. It’s also their funniest and most self-referential.
The past three National albums—a.k.a. the ones that launched the band from semi-obscurity to festival headliner—have been released in late spring, but they couldn’t be wintrier. And yes, the new Trouble Will Find Me burbles in the same gloomy stewpot as the uniformly excellent Alligator, Boxer, and High Violet,…
Matt Berninger continues to find inspiration behind suburbia's blackout curtains as The National deliver their wisest, most stately record to date.
Trouble Will Find Me may be The National’s funniest album to date. Not that it has a whole lot of competition.
Upon first spin, Trouble Will Find Me, the warm, wistful, and weary sixth long-player from the National, sounds a lot like 2010's warm, wistful, and weary High Violet, but where the former was built on a foundation of suburban despondency and casual, middle class self-destruction (and skillfully juggled melodrama and dark comedy), the latter feels mired in regret, seeking refuge in the arms of old friends and lost lovers, sounding for all the world like a single cube of ice lazily swirling about a recently drained tumbler of single malt scotch, a notion best intoned on early album standout "Demons," which casually announces "I am secretly in love with everyone I grew up with."
The National have always chosen to polish rather than reinvent; to delve deeper, rather than jump ship. So as LP number six prepares to see the light of day, those hoping for a new wheel best look away now. The journey to Trouble Will Find Me is arguably the least dramatic the band has made yet. It’s less ornate than High Violet, but more dense, instrumentally.
By this time, you pretty much know what you're going to get with a new album from The National.
Clash reviews Trouble Will Find Me, the sixth studio album from Brooklyn's The National
The sixth album from the National sees them perfecting their brand of ruminative rock, writes <strong>Paul Mardles</strong>
There’s something inherently stultifying about this otherwise well-crafted and satisfying album.
<p>The music is predictable, but subtlety and self-awareness make this an exquisite album, writes <strong>Maddy Costa</strong></p>
Indie rockers go from strength to strength on album number six. CD review by Lisa-Marie Ferla