High Violet - The National

eclectichoney

England, Conversation 16 & Sorrow are truly superb. Runaway & VCG seem a little 'safe' or unremarkable, but it's still early days!

Richard Cranium

I can't quite tell if it's a good thing or a bad thing that I love this album so much already. The other albums, Boxer in particular, were growers didn't appeal to me much on the first listen but now they are my absolute favourites. I suppose it can only be a good thing. I was so ridiculously excited about getting my hands on the album (so to speak) that there was no hope of an objective verdict on it. My highly subjective verdict is that it's brilliant though.

Spiritoftheseventies

btw the album is called High Violet if OP wants to correct title of thread.

monkey9

"Sorrow found me when i was young.
Sorrow waited, Sorrow won."

My God, that song just rips your heart out. Anyone who has suffered heartbreak or just can't get over that particular someone, this song resonates!

"I don't wanna get over you".

I feel for people who haven't discovered The National. I don't think the dictionary contains the words to describe how utterly brilliant this band are!!

Spiritoftheseventies

Safe bet to say people will be falling over each other to plug this album. Leaves the competition firmly in the shade.
Spread the word. This album is the real deal.

monkey9

Spiritoftheseventies wrote: »

Safe bet to say people will be falling over each other to plug this album. Leaves the competition firmly in the shade.
Spread the word. This album is the real deal.

Don't bother setting up an 'album of the year poll' in December. It's sorted!

jill_valentine

It's a strong contender, at least.

But I think there's one other big album due in the next two months or so that might take a shot at the title, IMHO.

Spiritoftheseventies

jill_valentine wrote: »

It's a strong contender, at least.

But I think there's one other big album due in the next two months or so that might take a shot at the title, IMHO.

Just an ideal but lets say each person "adopts" an album. Im going out on a limb with this one.
I mean what a line. I was carried on ohio in a swarm of bees.
Hugely impressed with the way in which band went out to put this album out via streaming.
And of course being on the same label as one of my top three bands of all time in Pixies is a huge plus as well.

jill_valentine

No fair, I don't even know what mine is called yet.

In all seriousness, this is definitely vying with Owen Pallett's Heartland for my favourite of the year so far. For very different reasons, though.

I've heard a few people suggest that this isn't really a big leap from the last disc for The National, but it feels like it to me. It just feels like everything works, in a way none of their previous releases did. There's no slack or filler.

I'd agree with the poster who reckons Terrible Love - or at least, that version of it - wasn't the perfect choice for album opener, and that's pretty much my sole criticism of it. Marvellous stuff.

Spiritoftheseventies

Ive only discoved them now but what a discovery. May check out their other stuff after this.

monkey9

Andrew Purcell
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 22 April 2010 21.30 BST


It was past six in the morning, in the bar of Bono's hotel in Dublin. The members of the National and REM were seated around a table. Michael Stipe, loose with whiskey, was in the mood to offer his friends in the cult Brooklyn band, whose records tend to the lugubrious and melancholy, some advice. "Why don't you guys just write a pop song? What are you afraid of? Don't be embarrassed."


The National's new album, High Violet, might be their response. It's full of hooks – but no one would ever call it pop. "We've tried," shrugs guitarist Aaron Dessner.

"We've never tried hard," says frontman Matt Berninger. "We turn our noses up at simple, infectious things because they sound pedestrian. This time I was determined to write pop melodies."

There is no obvious single – no Losing My Religion and certainly no Shiny Happy People. Everybody hurts, sometimes, in the National's songs, but they would never express it so directly.

For a happily married man, with a one-year-old daughter and a sense of humour, Berninger's lyrics are melancholy, to say the least. As he undresses his insecurities and sorrows, track after track, it's tempting to shout a few words of encouragement from the scaffolding: "Cheer up, mate, it might never happen." But he has not cheered up, and it has happened. Tickets for next month's Royal Albert Hall show sold out in four minutes. The National are rock stars.

It has taken them a decade, a lot of faith and an understanding bank manager to get there. "We call ourselves a back-alley whisper band, because you don't read about us that often, or see us on TV, but we can fill these big spaces," says Dessner. "We don't have casual fans – it's an obsessive, cult audience."

On a gorgeous spring afternoon in Brooklyn, Berninger, bassist Scott Devendorf and his brother Bryan, the drummer, are signing CDs round at the back of Dessner's house. "They're being sent to world leaders," jokes Berninger. "Obama has requested a copy."

It's fitting they're doing this at home, for the National are, literally, a garage band. Most of High Violet was recorded in their home studio: a shed in the garden where the previous owner parked his car. Dessner's brother-in-law, an architect from Norway, did the conversion, lining the interior with slats of cedar to deaden the acoustics. There are musical instruments and amplifiers strewn everywhere. It looks like the aftermath of a live radio session in a sauna.

It's here that Dessner and his twin brother and fellow guitarist, Bryce, obsessively rearrange the group's songs, working for weeks on an idea, only to discard it, hiring string players and horn sections, then cutting their contributions from the final mix, striving to make "a record that sounds homemade but also epic". Much of their breakthrough album, Alligator, was recorded in their sister's house, down the street. A fair bit of their last one, Boxer, was taped in the attic.

The National are a Brooklyn band, but all five grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Devendorfs played Led Zeppelin covers at the Dessners' junior high school dance, in an outfit called Paleface Jimmy, who were known locally for handing out hamburgers and wearing jester hats. The Dessners and Bryan Devendorf were in a folk rock band called Project Nim that had its moments on the college circuit. Berninger fronted a group called Nancy that aspired to be Pavement.

When they all met up again in New York, in 1999, they decided to "noodle around, press record and see what happens" without ever really intending to start a band. Once they had enough songs for a debut album, they put it out on their own label and went on tour in a van, taking it in turns to ride in the back with the equipment and exhaust fumes.

Their second album, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, earned some positive reviews but otherwise did little to suggest they would ever be able to give up their day jobs in web development. On their first European trip, they played an anarchist squat party in Frankfurt and were offered five bare mattresses and a case of stolen beer in return. They slept on floors covered with dog hair a centimetre deep, drove hundreds of miles to Kentucky to perform for Berninger's mum and a bored bartender, but never seriously considered packing it in.

"I think having two sets of brothers in the band has a lot to do with it," says Aaron Dessner. "There's something about the family dynamic that gives us a weird will. We're very protective of each other."

Berninger, who cracks open a bottle of sauvignon blanc before the interview, and confesses to getting "moderately hammered" before gigs to deal with his stage fright, thought each tour would be his last. "There was a youth hostel in Glasgow where our cots were filled with wet underwear when we arrived," he remembers. "I was 33 years old, in a dorm with loads of drunk kids, lying awake thinking,'What am I doing?' But for every moment like that there was a write-up, or Benicio del Toro would come to a show – just some little thing that would tell us it was going somewhere."

The biggest break was signing to the British label Beggars Banquet for their third album. On Mr November, Alligator's rousing closer, Berninger sings "the English are waiting", and promises that as "the new blue blood, the great white hope" he will not disappoint. On their first day in a proper tour bus, they celebrated like Brits on the piss, with a drunken melee that left one band member with a broken nose and vomit all over the bunk beds. "Some people got so excited that certain rules of the bus were broken," Bryan offers.

After they covered Mansion on the Hill at a Springsteen tribute show in New York, the Boss gave them a pep talk. "First you've got to create the wave, then you've got to ride the wave," he told them.

Michael Stipe brought Mike Mills to a gig, to vet them over a few drinks, before asking them to tour America with REM.

Mills's affection for the band's music is undimmed. "The National are real," he says. "I first saw them in London a few years ago, and they reminded me of REM in our earlier days. We all felt that they would be a good match-up for us on tour, and we were right."

The National have, on record at least, left their fist-pumping days behind. Their fourth album, Boxer, was anthem-free, with none of the cathartic screaming that had become Berninger's signature as a performer. His songs had always concerned the "unmagnificent lives of adults", but on Boxer he gave his introspective tendencies free rein, writing about drifting apart from friends, digging at the fault lines in relationships and wondering what happened to the "glowing young ruffian" he used to be.

The opening track, Fake Empire, was picked up for an Obama campaign video. "We were a little bewildered, because the song is not patriotic by any means," Berninger says. By discarding the vocals, the producers transformed his commentary on a generation lost to disillusion and self-medicated apathy into an advert for a multicultural, optimistic country, full of smiling people holding "hope" and "change" signs. In the clip, the piano refrain swells expectantly as Bryan pummels his drums hard enough to break down the White House door.

Because Berninger sounds like a polite Nick Cave and suffers like a literate Chris Martin, the National's music is often described as elegiac, when in truth, it's more uplifting than that. The rhythms are much too urgent to be called stately. The juxtaposition between the singer's mournful baritone and the joyous guitar lines and vocal harmonies is a defining characteristic of their sound. "You have to trust a voice like that," says friend and neighbour Sufjan Stevens. "He sings like an older brother with a dark side. He'll protect you on the playground, but he's not afraid to tell it like it is, and he'll kick you in the face if he has to."

Performing the new songs live for the first time, at the Bell House, in Brooklyn, they pull off the trick of having 10 men on stage without the music sounding cluttered. Occasional member and arranger Padma Newsome, on violin, viola and keyboards, plays a vital role. Horns are used sparingly. The band thumps when it needs to and drops down in an instant, with neat dynamic control. Stipe is in the crowd somewhere.

Writing the songs is a slow process, fraught with compromises and band politics. Usually, the twins come up with an idea, the Devendorfs compose a rhythm part, beat by beat, before handing it over to Berninger, who spends long hours in his bedroom, listening on headphones and scribbling in a notebook. The main reason High Violet took two years is the sheer amount of sweat that was left on the sauna floor – whole instrumentals, painstakingly worked out and recorded, only to be ditched because Berninger didn't find them inspiring.

"He can decide not to sing over something, which will kill it automatically," Aaron says. "No one else has that kind of power. We fight over almost everything. It's so hard for us to create songs that we all feel are compelling. Although we're confident and we love what we do, sometimes when you finish an album you wonder if you can do it again."

Berninger agrees: "We'll have heated debates over a flute line, a tambourine hit or a lyric. We'll go to war."

In their spare time, the Dessners have become guiding spirits of a scene, loosely based in Brooklyn but not confined to it. Dark Was the Night, the double album they produced last year for the Aids charity Red Hot, was a snapshot of contemporary north American indie, featuring the Arcade Fire, Dirty Projectors, Conor Oberst, the Decemberists, Grizzly Bear, Feist, Yeasayer, the New Pornographers and Cat Power. In the kitchen, over the door frame, there's a gameshow-sized publicity cheque, from Beggars Banquet to Red Hot for £432, 212 – the first six months' net profit. The album has now raised more than a million dollars for the charity.

Justin Vernon contributed a track as Bon Iver and wrote a duet with Aaron. "There was such a friendliness to them, a spirit that was way above any ego or mitigating vibe," he says. "There is a precision about their music that reaches places that only the National can scratch. High Violet is just making their arms longer." He sings backing vocals on the beatific last track, Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks. Sufjan handles harmonies on Afraid of Everyone.

These two songs are High Violet's emotional poles. Settling down has apparently not calmed Berninger's fears. If anything, his narrators are more neurotic than ever, living in "a city sorrow built" and forever worrying that "we've got another thing coming undone". Fans who responded to his nascent mid-life crisis on Alligator and Boxer will be relieved to find that having a child and approaching 40 has only intensified his feelings of alienation.

"Anxiety and worry are common mental states," he says. "I don't know many people who wake up in the morning filled with confidence and glee. But it's not a mid-life crisis because it never goes away. People have acne when they're adolescents but crisis goes throughout your whole life." Sitting with his bandmates on the sofa, a glass of wine in his hand, it looks like he doesn't have a care in the world.

High Violet is released on 4AD on 10 May.

monkey9

jill_valentine wrote: »

No fair, I don't even know what mine is called yet.

In all seriousness, this is definitely vying with Owen Pallett's Heartland for my favourite of the year so far. For very different reasons, though.

I've heard a few people suggest that this isn't really a big leap from the last disc for The National, but it feels like it to me. It just feels like everything works, in a way none of their previous releases did. There's no slack or filler.

I'd agree with the poster who reckons Terrible Love - or at least, that version of it - wasn't the perfect choice for album opener, and that's pretty much my sole criticism of it. Marvellous stuff.

I have to disagree here if you are saying there was slack or filler on the Alligator or Boxer albums. For me, there wasn't. I think, imo, they're two perfect albums from the noughties.

I'm going through this album for the second time (although i've already played to death Terrible Love and Bloodbuzz Ohio for the past few weeks and today, my new obsession is Sorrow), so i'm only getting into it.

This album will need to grow on me, but i felt the exact same way when i first heard Boxer. I loved Alligator so much when it first came out that i was scared Boxer might not live up to it. It did, after a bit.

This album will be the same, i feel. I know that this will be my album of the year. I have no doubt about. I have the utmost confidence in The National to believe that this album will get better and better and better with each listen!

monkey9

Spiritoftheseventies wrote: »

Ive only discoved them now but what a discovery. May check out their other stuff after this.

The National? Have you not heard Boxer or Alligator? I'm just not sure whether you're referring to The National or Owen Pallet (He's Final Fantasy, is he not?)

Spiritoftheseventies

monkey9 wrote: »

The National? Have you not heard Boxer or Alligator? I'm just not sure whether you're referring to The National or Owen Pallet (He's Final Fantasy, is he not?)

Referring to the National. Quite interesting that meeting that took place in the Clarence with REM and The National.

jill_valentine

I have to disagree here if you are saying there was slack or filler on the Alligator or Boxer albums. For me, there wasn't. I think, imo, they're two perfect albums from the noughties.

Might be a poor choice of words on my part.

I just mean that there's a few songs on each of their previous discs that just didn't snag me at all, anyway, and more often than not, Berninger's voice just sounded a bit flat, rather than just indie-ly jaded. Every note of this just feels perfect - right down to the weird little off-notes at the start of Lemonworld.

Spiritoftheseventies

Yes think I will get CD to get the full Car Stereo sound. Listening to album I think Bloodbuzz Ohio does it for me every time.

monkey9

Spiritoftheseventies wrote: »

Referring to the National. Quite interesting that meeting that took place in the Clarence with REM and The National.

So you haven't heard Alligator or Boxer??!!!! You have no idea how lucky you are. Trust me! My God, you're in for a world of pleasure.

If High Violet is the first and only National album you have listened to, yet you haven't listened to their previous stuff, it's like finding a porn mag and then losing your virginity!!

You also have Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers containing such delights as Cardinal Song (if she knows you're paper, you know she'll have to burn you), Slipping Husband, 90-Mile Water Wall, Murder Me Rachel and the beauty that is Lucky You!! ( You own me, there's nothing you can do. You own me)

The Cherry Tree EP: All Dolled Up In Straps, About Today.

The Virginia EP, you get a DVD with that one with the studio scenes recording songs.

These are just some of my highlights, you will find more. Basically, i believe, once you get their back catalogue, you have found your desert island band.

Spiritoftheseventies

Thanks for the recommendations Monkey. Would be worried that any other album of theirs would prove a let down after hearing this gem but have heard that the boxer is very good.

NapoleonInRags

monkey9 wrote: »

So you haven't heard Alligator or Boxer??!!!! You have no idea how lucky you are. Trust me! My God, you're in for a world of pleasure.

If High Violet is the first and only National album you have listened to, yet you haven't listened to their previous stuff, it's like finding a porn mag and then losing your virginity!!

You also have Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers containing such delights as Cardinal Song (if she knows you're paper, you know she'll have to burn you), Slipping Husband, 90-Mile Water Wall, Murder Me Rachel and the beauty that is Lucky You!! ( You own me, there's nothing you can do. You own me)

The Cherry Tree EP: All Dolled Up In Straps, About Today.

The Virginia EP, you get a DVD with that one with the studio scenes recording songs.

These are just some of my highlights, you will find more. Basically, i believe, once you get their back catalogue, you have found your desert island band.

Don't forget about 'Available' from Sad Songs ... man what a song...what a band..

mosstin

NapoleonInRags wrote: »

Have you read the article beside the NY Times stream? This band don't do things by numbers...

The process might not be by numbers but that doesn't mean that the end product won't sound like it. Just a song that leaves me utterly cold.

NapoleonInRags

mosstin wrote: »

The process might not be by numbers but that doesn't mean that the end product won't sound like it. Just a song that leaves me utterly cold.

Fair enough - but I wouldn't be surprised if you end up loving it!

Aldebaran

Loving Runaway right now.

'We don't bleed, when we don't fight,
Go ahead, go ahead, throw your arms in the air tonight'

A Neurotic

On my third listen. I don't expect to really love this album for at least a month, and I'm not going to force it. Boxer and Alligator were slow-burners, and all the better for it.

Heisenberg.

This post has been deleted.

Luke8

Great album, just taking a quick look at the code for the New York Times page though, it's pretty evident the songs aren't being streamed through a secure server

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/TEMPLATES/MultiTrackInlinePlayer/data/20100425_national.xml

I'm not encouraging downloading the album for free, it can't help the band when it's handed out on a plate...

Spiritoftheseventies

Luke8 wrote: »

Great album, just taking a quick look at the code for the New York Times page though, it's pretty evident the songs aren't being streamed through a secure server

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/TEMPLATES/MultiTrackInlinePlayer/data/20100425_national.xml

I'm not encouraging downloading the album for free, it can't help the band when it's handed out on a plate...

The album is being streamed. Not the same as being downloaded for free If Im right.

Luke8

It's being streamed through a flash player, but the songs aren't secure on their server, hence the xml file links into that page, so if you opened that in quicktime, you can simply download the album, a bit unprofessional I thought from a security point of view.


*Just to amend it just happened that the free quicktime player was the default player I had in Firefox, probably doesn't really matter what player someone has, that xml file I listed, if you copied one song at a time i.e http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/magazine/20100425-national-stream/01TerribleLove.mp3 pasted into firefox, then it's simply 'File - Save Page as' and you can download the album.

* I don't condone downloading illegally, and I'm just pointing it out as a technical issue I notice a lot with streaming mediums.

NapoleonInRags

Holy Portaloos Batman! Just noticed that the National are playing the Picnic this year!

http://www.goldenplec.com/2010/03/24/electric-picnic-lineup-2010/

monkey9

Luke8 wrote: »

It's being streamed through a flash player, but the songs aren't secure on their server, hence the xml file links into that page, so if you opened that in quicktime, you can simply download the album, a bit unprofessional I thought from a security point of view.


For example open the first song in firefox, and if you have quicktime it will allow you download it directly to your computer.

There's apparently already leaks of this album out there anyway so the band decided to put the stream out so that fans could hear the album as it should be heard, and not a dodgy sounding leak!

monkey9

A Neurotic wrote: »

On my third listen. I don't expect to really love this album for at least a month, and I'm not going to force it. Boxer and Alligator were slow-burners, and all the better for it.

Yeah, this happened with Boxer and even more so with the Virginia EP, it will happen with this, i'm sure.

The National's songs have so many layers to them. It's like the more you listen, the more they open up until, in time, they just fully bloom and you are struck dumb by their beauty.