Review Summary: You grow up and you calm down, you're working for the clampdown
Now undoubtedly one of the leading 'alternative rock' bands across the Atlantic, 'Alligator' is the album that kicked it all off commercially for the sombre Ohio quintet, and established them as the spokespeople of the alienated masses of modern capitalism.
Much of the album deals with the 20s - the sense of leaving university with dreams and unrealised potential, and finding that chipped away day by day by the mundanities of the modern workplace, with all its corporate management speak and disregard for individual thought and intellectualism. The track that sums this up most directly is 'Baby We'll Be Fine', where Berninger confesses that his dreams consist of 'my boss to stop me in the hallway, lay a hand on my shoulder and say, son I've been hearing good things.'
Along with the isolation and panic of day to day office life, 'Alligator' and much of The National's later output also deals with losing hold of childhood friends and familiar neighbourhoods. On 'Friend Of Mine', Berninger pleads 'won't you come here and stay with me, why don't you come here and stay with me' to a friend who doesn't call him back. Whereas he confesses on 'Looking For Astronauts' that these absent friends have a 'permanent piece of my medium sized American heart.'
As Morrissey asked us to treasure 'the songs that saved your life' in 'Rubber Ring', The National also convey this sense of communion in being a music fan and using that to connect emotionally with treasured memories and distant faces. Though our record collections may 'all run together and never make sense, but that's how we like it, and that's all we want.'
The lyrics of longing, the insistent rhythm beats, the desolate arpeggios. All of these would be magnified and pushed towards the grandiose on later output such as 'Boxer' and 'High Violet', but it is on 'Alligator' where we find The National at their most wide-eyed and vulnerable, and it is this emotional honesty that gives the album a sense of refuge and solace for the average confused middle class product of the 21st century. You may not be the most famous, successful, 'Mr November' next leader of the world, but when you listen to this album and really pay attention to it, you will still feel like an 'heir to the glimmering world.'
