The National: Trouble Will Find Me (2013)

(4AD)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Did you think I was waiting to talk about Trouble Will Find Me just because I didn't really know what I thought of it yet? You should know me better than that -- I'm kidding, of course; you're absolutely right. Until the last few days, that was almost a mere "recommended." The release of the National's High Violet slightly predated my determination to analyze every new album I listened to in this space so you never really saw me talking about it, but it was an immediately treasured item here and made sense to me the instant that the first expansive chord of "Sorrow" struck (I never dug "Terrible Love" much). Given that sort of an expectation, it becomes hard to cope when the follow-up, heard too offhand in a few contexts to form a coherent opinion before a full-fledged concentration, revealed slight disappointment -- nothing that immediately signaled me as distinctive, vital or just supernaturally "right" in the same way.

But context is everything -- the album just demanded to be heard at night and without interruption. I don't mean that in the sense that it makes a little more sense in the dark or sounds a little better on headphones or great speakers or in the car, I mean it comes completely alive and is almost identifiably a different recording in its properly lonely setting. The songs are less bare and impulsive and individually disparate than those of High Violet, hence some of the resultant consternation, but while the albums carry forward similar moods and modes of expression, Trouble is appreciably less cautious: more nakedly haunted. Yet musically, the band seems in tighter control than ever; despite carefully evoking the emotional context of a band playing to a few people in a bar far too close to last call, with autumn chill just out the door, the band has never before sounded so primed for what we once would have called the rock mainstream.

Mood is everything to the National; their usage of the manic depressive arena-rock sound is plainly more mature than trailblazers like Pearl Jam, in part because they celebrate the lonely Saturday night drunkenness and regret of far more luminous forebears. It was by coincidence that in the middle of making notes for this review I listened to Sam Cooke's Night Beat and Television's Adventure and noticed that the three artists seem to all greet urban life with simultaneous romance and dread, breaking down the city like blurry lights distorted in puddles along the street. The melancholy is immense, even if I have little doubt that its somehow florid, soulful starkness would allow it to enhance a makeout session, and at its best, its intricate inversions of conventional rock rhythms and eerie, choked-up nostalgia recall the R.E.M. of Automatic for the People and New Adventures in Hi-Fi -- there is really that much buried, slowly unveiling pleasure and detailed emotional thrust to be found in these songs.

Like High Violet, the record opens with its strangest song, but "I Should Live in Salt" more convincingly collects its draggily weird rhythm into AM balladry by the chorus. Here and elsewhere, the bigness of the drums and guitar suggest U2 if not Arcade Fire or Coldplay, but despite sharing the easy, baseline appeal of those bands, the National's oceanic, shadowy film noir music stands apart thanks to both its sparse cleanliness and sense of despair. Their big minor key chords, clipped melodies and gruff sorrow are the best use anyone's made lately of a "big" sound. We could say those same things about High Violet, clearly, but if the band seemed to come into its own then, here they sustain that confidence and find ways to toy with it -- always with the insistent bedrock of Bryan Devendorf's indispensable drums.

There is more pain now in Matt Berninger's baritone, which suggests if anything that the confidence brought to the band by their prior record has made them more comfortable with ambiguity and stretching -- while the band moves along with their usual dry tension and guitar intricacy, taking off when they want to but often deliberately not, Berninger explores a vulnerability and simply expresses himself more variably. He can intone quietly "I am secretly in love with everyone that I grew up with" on the upside-down Scottish folk "Demons" or find the sinister in the heartfelt on "Fireproof" or softly proclaim "things are tougher than we are" on the reverbed piano-heavy "Heavenfaced." He seldom lets loose and belts out now, but he finds more territory to scope out in his quieter, sobered up morning-after vocal range, much like Ira Kaplan did circa Painful.

At the album's best, it may indeed eclipse the less complex and multilayered songs from High Violet, even if the goals of these tracks are markedly different, and even if in some respects they are more derivative of various familiar pop music conventions. "This Is the Last Time" may be the best song they have written to date, its gorgeous minimalistic riff and its lonely and beautifully painful ramble off into the ether almost breathtaking, its pin-drop quiet such that you barely notice it's tuning up the strings and horns and building and building behind you. Part one is the swung-around neon streets "but your love is such a swamp / you don't think before you jump" monologue, and then comes the confessional, an entirely separate back half graced by the presence of Sharon van Etten and Berninger laying bare like ever before: "Jenny, I am in trouble," he cries, always in control but losing it behind the curtain.

Less ambiguous but equally stunning pleasures are to be found in the Johnny Cash-like "I Need My Girl," an eerie bit of longing that comes on almost tangibly like returning to a place long since abandoned; its romance is hard-won and possibly not won at all, its repeated insistences of sanity and self-awareness ("I am good and I am grounded") more realistic because they're so unconvincing, and the song is catchy enough to be someone's first dance if it didn't seem so somber or embody such sentiments as "there are some things I should never laugh about in front of family." The song is built around a crafty, lilting guitar riff familiar as one the Dessner brothers helped create for Sufjan Stevens' "Impossible Soul" three years ago... which isn't the only moment of recognizable throwback here. With some clarity I feel that "Slipped" shares the von Sternberg movie soundtrack and city-life chills of the Clash's "Broadway," but that is no slur on its beauty and dramatic weight, the deconstruction and solace of a man having trouble living inside his skin -- achingly familiar and undoubtedly felt, of course.

There are other traces of the past: the Smiths and the Cure and even a touch of Abbey Road on "Humiliation," which finds Berninger discovering the lowest tones we've heard from his voice yet, and the slowed-down ragtime of the piano ballad 'Pink Rabbits" (which pokes light fun at the apparently constant use of High Violet songs in various teen-targeted TV dramas of the last few years), slowed down because you'd be surprised if they wanted to dance with you now. The urgency of the new wave on the pop-blissful "Don't Swallow the Cap" is dashed with restraint for presumably the same reason; the title is a Tennessee Williams reference (not to one of his plays, but to his actual death) and that kind of sets the dour stage -- they're not exactly Twin Shadow but they love the '80s too, though bully on them if it's the Beatles' Let It Be they mean and not the Replacements'.

The sole drawback to all this is that Trouble Will Find Me cannot finally match the leanness and concise nature of High Violet, and for all its wit and self-criticism, you can see the strings a little. Witness the clearly calculated bone-to-the-recent-converts inclusion of "Sea of Love," a towering crescendo that goes just where you expect, and "Graceless," a propulsive tune whose hooks unabashedly burst out of the speakers, which perversely makes it feel like one of the record's least cathartic songs. These aren't lowlights exactly, they just contain elements of the band doing what's probably expected of them and fattening up the running time as a result; without them (and with "I Should Live in Salt" not so awkwardly positioned as the album opener), the record's pleasures and brilliance might be easier and quicker to discern.

But no problem. This is a focused, emotive, direct rock album; every note seems to correspond to a force -- it yearns to be heard and to express something even if ambiguous -- along the lines of Arcade Fire's first two records but with its groove imbued with longing instead of mere spirit. It falls over you in a shower of blissful grief; by the time the sun comes up on "Hard to Find," you know you've made it through another night and that you'll survive another one. Trouble Will Find Me is the solace you seek out when you don't think anybody you know is awake.