Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
I don’t understand this world anymore. Careers are ruined by something someone said in high school but career criminals break the law with impunity in the upper echelons of power. People become rich and famous for being rich and famous while the poor are herded into shrinking pockets of the inner-city or left fallow in small towns, their political currency exploited by those who despise them. We build up heroes only to mock them later. Our outrage is selective, our morals subjective. I think Matt Berninger, frontman for indie rockers The National, probably feels the same way I do. The only problem is I don’t understand him either.
Since coming together in Brooklyn in the early 2000s, Ohio ex-pats The National have tried on various styles, from alt-country to a kind of post-punk lite. In early 2019 they released their eight studio album, I Am Easy To Find, which found them utilizing orchestral pop arrangements, including a strings and a children’s choir. The album was accompanied by a short film directed by filmmaker Mike Mills (2016’s 20th Century Women) which was premiered at a “Special Evening With the National” at New York’s Beacon Theater on April 22, 2019. Following the screening, the band performed their new album in its entirety. Now streaming on Amazon Prime, The National: I Am Easy To Find presents the performance half of the show.
Formed when the band members were in their late 20s and early 30s, The National at times seem almost self-consciously adult. Their music could easily be heard in a Prius commercial or a PSA for sustainable wind energy. Berninger, in particular, has a distinct Dad Rock vibe to him, though of the Park Slope variety. He’s the cool, literate dad who takes his kids to the Guggenheim – he actually references the museum while introducing one song – and takes them out for hamachi kama afterwards. He’s so Dad Rock we see him hanging out with (who I assume is) his young daughter backstage. Then he takes the stage, bathed in gentle peach-colored lighting. With his black frame glasses and grey speckled beard, he looks not unlike a hipper version of the actor Bryan Cranston.
Of course, The National are more than just their lead singer. They also include two sets of brothers; Aaron and Bryce Dessner, who share guitar and keyboard duties, and the rhythm section of Bryan Devendorf on drums and his brother Scott on bass. For this performance, they are joined by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble string section, the Brooklyn Youth Choir and guest singers Julien Baker, Mina Tindle, Kate Stables.
Many of the songs from the album begin with a simple piano figure, before opening up and revealing lush arrangements, while Berninger meditates on life, relationships and the world around him. Berninger’s vocal style is almost spoken word in delivery, like Leonard Cohen with a Midwestern twang. While The National’s roostier influences have subsided over the years, at times they sound like an Americana Coldplay, richer in timbre but lacking the British band’s anthemic hooks.
Filmed sympathetically by director David Ctiborsky, a giant filmscreen behind the band projects snippets of lyrics in passive colors like mauve and lavender. “You had your soul with you, I was in no mood,” Berninger sings at one point. “Is this how I lose it? Everything at once carried to space by a dolphin ballon?,” is another. Many of the lyrics were co-written with his wife, the fiction writer Carin Besser.
I’m really not sure what Berninger’s singing about most of the time but the lyrics seem very writerly, trying to find profundity in their vagueness. “Not In Kansas” is better, as Berringer tries to unravel the present in traces of the past. “My bedroom is a stranger’s gunroom / Ohio’s in a downward spiral / I can’t go back there anymore / Since alt-right opium went viral,” he sing-speaks and name-checks R.E.M., The Strokes and Hanne Darboven, who I had to Google.
After running through the songs off the album, not in order, The National leave the stage in anticipation of an encore. When they return, the well mannered audience finally gets up out of their seats, Berninger takes off his jacket and they all get loose on some older numbers. The band approaches something adjacent to rock, there’s almost kind of a guitar solo and Berninger raises his voice. During the final song he picks up his foldable music stand, which his lyrics were taped to, and hands it to an audience member, but not without a fatherly warning, “Yeah, collapse it so it doesn’t hurt anybody.”
Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.
