The National - Trouble Will Find Me

I really love This Is The Last Time.

I got invited to see these guys tomorrow night in Brooklyn, at the Barclays Center. Such an odd band to become an arena headliner.

Trying to like this... But it's not working.

Do I need to look up the lyrics and sit down with it top really get it? I'm prepared to do that if ILX thinks it wise.

There's too much going on on this record, too many ideas, too many layers, too many instruments. It blurs together as a consequence, and the songs lose a sense of individuality; live they were more discernible as separate entities, Graceless had far more energy and punch, for instance. For that reason, for me, this is inferior to High Violet and Boxer by quite some way. My wife adores it though, but she likes them far more than me in general.

Its too tasteful. They're very tasteful generally, obviously, but this over-stepped, I think.

Agreed, and I think it's just too long a record to maintain this sound successfully. Boxer has a similar consistent sound & feel, but is the perfect length for an album (IMHO) so it never drags ...

no surprise this has appeared on a few EOY lists.

As maximalist as it is, Boxer has a certain economy in the way it's mixed; there's never too many elements.

This album is... not for me. Sends me to sleep.

I see all your points and don't disagree with 'em, but fuck it, I love this record anyway. I think Berninger's writing is good enough that I can overlook the goopiness.

This is The National's best record. Funny that the band has this reputation as so uptight, because this album feels so loose and free to me. The lyrics have a free-association feel to them at times, but they're also pointed and funny, and littered with music-geek references. It doesn't feel like a sad album to me as much as it does an album about the joys of listening to sad records. I just unabashedly love it.

So I've listened to this a few times, and originally I didn't find much to latch onto. I'm not a lyrics guy, but on previous National albums, I could usually find one or two songs with an undeniable hook, and that was good enough. This one, not so much. But God help me, the more I listen to this, the more I kind of dig the ~vibe~ of it. Like, my favorite experience with the National was seeing them live at Pitchfork a few years ago, and they were all clad in suits, and it was night-time, and that sort of literate, leather-voiced, boozy-warm miserabilism worked really well in that setting. So maybe I just need to pour myself some scotch and sit in an armchair in a dimly lit room and just soak it up, you know?

like Matt Berninger himself!

Problem is, I'm a bourbon guy.

Listen again to Pink Rabbits: maybe my favorite lyrics of any of their songs.

Never paid attention to these guys but a bad breakup and deciding to give this band a go coincided fortuitously.

This album is amazing. 2013 was an amazing year for music i don't care what the actual music critics on this board say.

it is only a great year for music when paris hilton releases an album.

Finish your pink rabbits, fellas.

they were on Saturday Night Live last Saturday night and it was really good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ack4cJry0as&list=UUzB3VrTOjAStUvaLPMDjHDw

The National are a dark hole to go down when you're going through a breakup

Good luck, Gukbe

<3 to Gukbe

this record along with others serve a similar function for me although i think theres a risk of "indulging" too much in sadness with music like this, at least for me. certain lines in this record really get to the heart of things though. it's self-indulgent and sentimental but there isn't an ounce of bullshit anywhere, if ounces are even the right unit to measure bullshit.

To me the National fill the same role the Cure once played. Not depressing/sad so much as a certain mood that can apparently be conjured at will.

Yeah. I had picked up their last three albums on the rec of a friend last year but never bothered to give them more of a once over. When relationship collapsed and I found myself suddenly moving cities in a rental car for a 16 hour drive, I couldn't bear to listen to anything I knew so I put them on because the mood felt right. Can't tell if listening to them on a loop for all those hours made things worse or better, but I certainly appreciate them now when I never did before.

(truth be told if I had any tindersticks on my ipod I probably would've reached for them)

...I don't know why I'd never connected Tindersticks and The National until you did just just now but otm

They have their similarities but I would never confuse them. Tindersticks more soulful and ... wry? Dry?

why?

To me the National fill the same role the Cure once played.

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, March 15, 2014

http://fogsmoviereviews.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/blasphemer.jpg

Note the past tense, man. The Cure hasn't done anything I've liked even the slightest bit since "Bloodflowers," and that was back in ... 2000? Not coincidentally, the same year the National more or less kicked off, though still a good 5 years before "Alligator."

Re: Tindersticks, I always thought the band was going for, or has been going for for some time now, this moody formalist soul thing, and that also its sense of humor was so deliberately subsumed into this morass of delirious melancholia. The National are a lot artier, more inclined toward amorphous ambient guitar shading, both funnier yet also, strangely, heavier in terms of mood. That is:

certain lines in this record really get to the heart of things though.

This is really key to the National, I think. Tindersticks is more explicit in its ennui or whatever. The National, lyrically, is goofier, more surreal and/or stream of conscious, tossed off, but they somehow convey (at their best) something really powerful.

I was teething on roses/I was in guns and noses

I have noticed that this album features more than its share of references to hanging at the pool, however obliquely. "I’ll try to call you from the party/It’s full of punks and cannonballers." "All the L.A. women/Fall asleep while swimmin'." Etc.

The LA women verse is one of my favorites in any song ever. "She said babe you're better off..." A hypercondensed short story.

i like that verse too. "i got paid to fish 'em out and then one day i lost the job" is a lil tangled up in blue.

This album is so perfect I almost don't want them to follow it up.

it's their best record but i think they can better it, or at least make it shorter

^ could almost agree

to me it's surprising they had this in them after the misstep of high violet

And frankly, I think that was a pretty subtle misstep.

a misstep disguised as a great The National record. very clever!

i can't get my head around it
i keep feeling smaller'n'smaller

Not a big fan but I love Pink Rabbits. Such a gorgeous and sad song.

like the cocktail, you can only order it monthly

Love the Nationals. Really do. But hell is a party with them as the only soundtrack.

that's why they're hangover music. the musical echo of a long headache.

good fall music

http://www.danshort.com/pl/b/Paradise0001.jpg

This might be my favorite indie-rock album of the last five years. I still listen to it all the time and I'm always floored by its wisdom and wit and replayability.

the chord changes in Pink Rabbits are so great, and i love the unusual structure of the song. great lyrics, too. "I was a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park"

If anything I think the band's more-of-the-same reputation has lead people to underrate this record, which is at the very least gorgeous and powerful and moving and funny.

I heard this album in full a couple of times, and right now I'm struggling to remember anything about it, bar the fact it didn't leave enough of an impression while I was listening to it to warrant sticking with it. A boring record, in other words. 2013 is my favourite year of the decade for music so far, too.

There is no such thing as boring music, just boring people.

I kid. If you can't remember it, give it another listen!