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THE NATIONAL
LOST AND FOUND
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On "Secret Making," the gently rolling first track on Alligator (Beggars), singer Matt Berninger, muses, "I think this place is full of spies/I think they’re on to me." And then, with paranoid urgency creeping into his debauched baritone, he asks, "Didn’t anybody . . . Didn’t anybody tell you . . . Didn’t anybody tell you how to gracefully disappear in a room?" As he took the stage last Saturday at T.T. the Bear’s Place with his Cincinnati-by-way-of-Brooklyn band of brothers — guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner, bassist Scott Devendorf, drummer Bryan Devendorf — the tall, blond, scruffy but not quite disheveled frontman seemed to be looking for a place to, if not exactly disappear, at least hide for a time. Instead, he grabbed a drink, downed half of it, grabbed the microphone stand as if to stabilize himself, closed his eyes, and waited for the rest of the National to generate a few familiar chord progressions and backbeats he could lose himself in. They didn’t exactly bow to his wishes: with two Gibson-wielding guitarists and a powerhouse drummer, the National could easily have overwhelmed Berninger with walls of distorted power chords. Instead, as on Alligator and 2003’s Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers (Brassland), the Dessners held back at first, weaving a quiet bed of fingerpicked chords and restrained melodic arpeggios for Berninger to lay a head full of broken dreams upon, sometimes dropping out altogether to ensure that doomed little admissions like "I put on an argyle sweater and put on a smile/I don’t know how to do this" weren’t lost on the way to climaxes full of the simple shouted apology "I’m so sorry for everything" ("Baby, We’ll Be Fine"). Except nothing’s ever as simple as it seems with the National. There’s something defiantly and unironically post-punk ’80s in their sound — Interpol producer Peter Katis mixed the 2003 disc, and the new one was engineered by Paul Mahajan, who’s best known for his work with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. As Berninger stalked the stage, looking in vain for a comfortable, out-of-the-way place to hide, only to explode into barely contained, inwardly directed fits of rage shouted from atop the monitor in front of him, I was reminded of films I’ve seen of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis. And yet there’s no overt neo-new-wave eye shadow here, no synth drones or faux Brit accents. For all the Dessners’ strum-and-drone austerity, strong hints of Midwest Americana still emerged as the guitars almost twanged and Berninger surveyed a landscape of broken dreams only to concede, in "Looking for Astronauts," "You know you have a permanent piece of my medium-sized American heart." In the realm of the National, that counts as a grandiose gesture.
BY MATT ASHARE
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