Review Summary: A letter of resignation.
It's no secret that I tend to conflate personal experience and objective criticism in my writing. Part of me thinks I'm just a selfish music listener, picking through records like a vulture for little moments I can steal for myself instead of just letting it all wash over me like the artist intended. It's kind of a sickness, to put it bluntly - one I have an idea of how to treat, but we'll get to that momentarily.
The National have been one of my favourite bands to write about over the years, largely because the experience of falling in love with a band I wildly misinterpreted off the bat taught me a whole lot about listening to and critically analysing music. I still remember that fateful spin of "Cardinal Song", of all songs: that wide-eyed feeling of revelation when the violins came in towards the end, that realisation of 'this Berninger dude, he's onto something' as the "Jesus Christ you have confused me" coda began. I've been chasing that feeling ever since, with this band and others, and it's been a search that resulted in nothing that I initially wanted, but which exposed me to truly invaluable pieces of music and art along the way.
But you're probably wondering what any of this has to do with me making a reasonably positive case for
First Two Pages of Frankenstein, so allow me to decentre myself. The National sometimes use architectural descriptors to describe their music: it's an apt language for the foundations laid by Bryan Devendorf's quicksilver drumming, the support beams of brother Scott's bass and the guitarwork of the Dessner twins, the rooms filled up with furniture excavated from Matt Berninger's cluttered marvel of a mind. The textural touches of piano and orchestration, formerly just an extra lick of paint over plain white walls, over time growing to become the primary colour. "[...]We're building a whole sculptural world with the songs", Aaron says of
First Two Pages of Frankenstein, referring to its interplay of rockier backing tracks, partially recorded live or in rehearsal rooms, and the glistening layers of polish on top. It's a new approach to recording that the band seem to credit with saving them from their latest, and apparently closest, brush with disbanding for good.
At first blush, it's an odd combination that recalls R.E.M.'s sprawling opus
New Adventures in Hi-Fi, another half-live half-studio band-in-crisis document which earns comparisons to a masterful piece of architecture. But unlike that lengthy America-through-a-van-window travelogue,
...Frankenstein is a lean and almost entirely subdued affair, clocking in at 11 delicate tracks that slip away just as they seem primed to fully arrive. Then there's Berninger's lyrics: increasingly stripped back and linear on
Sleep Well Beast and
I Am Easy to Find, here we find the singer clawing his way back to the ego-damaged stream-of-consciousness monologues that marked his early triumphs. The album follows a loose conceptual thread of a person trying to let go of a relationship, from an amusingly self-referential opener which winks at the band's bygone eras with a ghostly Sufjan Stevens cameo, a sharply observed portrait of a failed couple trying to split up their possessions on "Eucalyptus", and coming around to a moment of grace in closer "Send for Me", an outright love song that plays like a re-evaluation of "Gospel" all these years later, the icy drinks and sardonic distance replaced by a genuine warmth and closeness that the band have never really allowed before.
It feels like a goodbye and an earmarked new chapter all at once, an appropriate enough place for me to close my own book on The National, and my time here as a whole. An admission that will surprise none of you: I've always buried myself in words instead of trying to face reality head-on, a crutch which at one point became more like an avoidance mechanism, one I'm sincerely trying to change. This might explain why I gravitated so strongly towards The National's orbit, this curious band with the razor-sharp lyricism and gentle ennui, in the first place. It definitely explains why it feels so right to bookend my time here as a full-time writer with a National review; my unabashed and somewhat delusional defense of this band throughout the highs and lows of their career is a perfect summation of how I spent the majority of my time on this site. It was a hell of a ride, and I wouldn't trade it for anything, but if you'd permit me one more moment of self-indulgence: this only works if I let go too.
