Categories : Featured Review, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 5 / 5 Reviewer: Andre Guimond |
High Violet is anxious, tense, laden with blurry visions that lead to crooked, lonely back streets to wander through while we try to grasp the emotion and reach of each song. It’s never a strain that becomes wearing or tiring, though; in fact, it’s exactly in that tension between depression and desire, anxiety and confidence, the social and the personal, where the beauty of this album resides.
Straight away we’re greeted with, “It’s terrible love / when I’m walking with spiders [...] it’s quiet company” on lead-off ‘Terrible Love,’ and as the song builds into a crescendo of noise the disquieting menace of that line turns into anxiety over a relationship slowly breaking down. It’s a theme that crops up frequently, most evocatively on ‘Sorrow’ where baritone sing-talker Matt Berninger bemoans a life-long depression that he tries to twist and use to keep his partner around (“cover me in rag and bone sympathy / ‘cause I don’t want to get over you”).
While songs like these still have their fair share of patented Berninger lyrical obscurity, it’s fairly clear what’s going on, but the message gets a little muddier when he starts delving into the political. “Venom radio and / venom television / I’m afraid of everyone” could be expressing the M.O. of the fear-mongering owners of the corporate media of America, or the effects on their targets (“with my shiny new / star-spangled tennis shoes”) in ‘Afraid of Everyone.’ On standout ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio,’ the ambiguity of lines like “Lay my head on the hood of your car / I take it too far” run counter to an experience that far too many Americans will be able to identify with: “I still owe money to the money to the money I owe / The floors are falling out from everybody I know.”
As bleak as it may sound – and it does sound bleak, the guitars, drums, pianos and horns all swirling up and around the low tones of Berninger’s delivery, as if trying to both empathize with him yet prompting him to some kind of hope – it’s not heavy, and it never feels forced or out of place. Sure, there’s sorrow, angst, anger, doubt and fear aplenty here, but then you have moments like on ‘Conversation 16’ where, right after Berninger actually sings “I was afraid / I’d eat your brains / ‘cause I’m evil” without sounding campy, we get this: “I’ll try to be more romantic / I want to believe in everything you believe / I was less than amazing / I do not know what all the troubles are for / I’ll fall asleep in your branches / you’re the only thing I want any more”. Although at first it may be a struggle to understand the turn from eating someone’s brains to sleeping in their arms, that reconciliation reflects the singer’s own seeming disparity between imagined, perceived and realized self. In short, as tough as much of the material here is to break down, we’re not alone: Berninger is still working through it just as much as we are.
After the critical success of Alligator (2005) and Boxer (2007), each of which represented consistent steps forward in developing The National’s sound without ever taking that precipitous leap into utter and debilitating stardom, it was fair to wonder if they could do it again. High Violet is solid proof that these guys know what they’re doing and, while they’re undoubtedly ambitious, that facet of their work is directed at their output, not their input. Like Animal Collective, TV on the Radio, Beach House, Deerhunter/Atlas Sound, among others, The National are part of the new group of American bands that keep getting better without ever compromising how they got there.
