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Jun 10Nationalism.
It’s odd there aren’t more songs about the lives of normal white people. You know, the vaguely-disaffected, salaried young professionals who make up a huge percent of the music-buying (and stealing) public. It seems like there should be thousands of bands of all musical bents singing about their (skinny) ties and societal obligations. Instead, it’s mostly limited to post-punks who traffic in tired variations on an inchoate “city as impersonal wasteland” theme–and, of course, the National.1 And a lot of white2 kids yuppies like the National. Nearly all the people at last Saturday’s show were past college age, and they were overwhelmingly white-collar, mild-mannered and employable-looking–waiting for the kickoff of their quarter-life crisis. I imagine Peace Corps recruiters would do fantastically if they stopped by.
Anyway, we actually missed most of Antlers’ opening set, and got back in the middle of a post-rocky buildup-and-breakdown worthy of Mono (which made me want to check out Hospice), and their last, less-interesting song (which is why I still haven’t gotten around to it).
Then The National came on. They played a lot of new songs, as well as a surprising number of tracks from Alligator (setlist here), which was pleasantly surprising–the album has a lot more visceral moments than either Boxer or High Violet, which makes it ideal for a live show. The rest of the band was great–very tight and synched-in3. I had been a little concerned that the National wouldn’t be interesting to watch live, since they don’t exactly seem like cock-rocker types. But although the rest of the band stayed more or less static, singer Matt Berninger was pent-up, pacing the stage4, pounding his thigh with an open palm, and generally acting like the painfully self-aware, high-strung neurotic you’d expect from his lyrics. He had his rock-star moments, though, screaming out parts of “Squalor Victoria” and “Abel,” during which he also jumped down from the stage and walked into the crowd (who helpfully held his microphone cord in the air), and in the middle of “Mr. November” he climbed to the balcony, and finished the song walking on top of the balcony bar. It was, in short, a good gig.
- Fair warning: you’re not going to get an unbiased review of anything National-related from me. I am entirely, completely in love with their last three albums (to the point where there’s not a single song on Alligator, Boxer or High Violet I don’t like. Well…maybe “City Middle.” But I don’t hate it, and that’s probably the only one.). ↩
- I’d say the audience was over 95% white. Asians made up most of the rest. ↩
- The only downside was the volume of the horns–they got lost on some of the louder tracks, but absolutely dominated “Runaway.” ↩
- At one point, with his scraggly beard and relentless, anxious activity, he reminded me distinctly of an emaciated captive lion. ↩