4 Great Albums for Winter: #2 The Antlers

Hospice

Kettering

Bear

Two

Epilogue

The Antlers had a lot of press for this year’s Burst Apart (which I personally found disappointing) and their just-out EP, but for me their debut was really something special. An indie-rock concept album charting the narrative of an abusive relationship with a woman dying of bone cancer, it’s one of the few albums that can justifiably be called tragic, and it also serves as a definitive soundtrack to the cold, white, wintry days.

Hospice is an emotional heavy-hitter, and every aspect of the album is tailor-made to make you feel as the narrator does. And although frontman Peter Silberman’s beautiful lyrics, transmitted in a quiet falsetto, are where the album most clearly shines; the instrumentation here does just as much to evoke the suffocation and deep sadness of the story. On Hospice, The Antlers perfected a gauzy hospital sound, as can be heard in the muffled and ghostly instrumental Prologue. Throughout they alternate between hazy, melancholy synth-work, simple guitar melodies and evocative instrumentals to reinforce the emotional weight of each stage of the narrative. Quietly stunning second track Kettering starts things off slowly, establishing the abrasive female lover, ‘you said you hated my tone / made you feel so alone / and you told me I ought to be leaving’ and her death sentence given by the doctor, which overshadows the rest of the album. It sets up a grand emotional arc with rare ambition, and it’s to The Antlers’ extreme delicacy and skill crafting the LP that the lofty heights they reach for aren’t out of their grasp.

The album’s skilled musicianship and snatches of beautiful lyrics are easy to appreciate, but Hospice is an album where every listen makes you fall harder for these songs. The dedicated listener can follow the story through from beginning to end, choosing to pay close attention to lyrics which really do stand up to scrutiny. Every track here feels like a necessary part of the concept, but there are still some that sparkle slightly more than others.  Coming straight after Kettering, the angry Sylvia shows the narrator’s intense frustration with his lover’s sensibility and situation, along with his converse acknowledgement that she can’t be any other way, and that he will look after her regardless; ‘let me take your temperature / you can throw the thermometer right back at me, if that’s what you wanna do okay’. It’s a complex and beautiful sentiment, and is expressed perfectly through the crashing chorus and the knife-edge tense verse instrumentation, with a thin line of discordant static making sure you never quite feel comfortable.

Midway through the album another stunner emerges, flashback episode Bear which reflects on an abortion the couple had in the past. The children’s lullaby tune that threads its way through the track is a fantastic accompaniment to the confused and deluded lovers; ‘we’re not scared of making caves/ or finding food for him to eat / we’re terrified of each other and terrified of what that means’. The lyrics also show the woman’s tendency to freeze out the narrator, ‘we’ll make only quick decisions / and you’ll just keep me in the waiting room’, using smart references and tiny details to flesh out the two central characters magnificently into living, breathing people whose tragedy the listener feels so acutely. The symbolic final image, ‘you sit in front of snowy television / suitcase on the floor’ is a poetic flourish showing just what a keen grasp Silberman has over the language he uses, putting his words to staggering emotional effect over and over again.

With the jangly acoustic single Two the narrator finally realises and accepts the prospect of her death, and it’s a dense lyrical affair with a deeply saddening chorus that goes some way to explaining the woman’s violent temperament. The lilting and absorbing follower, Shiva, deals with her death. The elegant image of the narrator transforming into his dying lover adds a heavy poignancy to the scene, as well as expressing perfectly his love which is unmarred by her difficult attitude, a curious conflict between wanting to be in her place and not wanting to be dragged down with her. His mourning is examined in majestic penultimate track Wake, the process of slowly opening up to your own grief and allowing others to help. It’s a quiet piece and contains some of the album’s most beautiful and poetic lyrics, such as the expression of him rejecting the help of his friends; ‘when your helicopter came and tried to lift me out / I put its rope around my neck’. It ends with what is essentially the only uplifting moment on the album, with powerful percussion driving forward his proclamation, which after the intense experience of the album comes across as a universal truth, ‘don’t ever let anyone tell you you deserve that’.

Silberman’s unique talent at turning a deeply personal story into a universally empathetic album is nothing short of staggering time and again, and I have nowhere near enough room to go into its depths, for example the interesting recurring theme of the female character creating her own fictions and narratives, somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. The barrier between the two states is explored in the unbearably beautiful closer, Epilogue, where the reality of his conflicted memories of his departed love are just as painful as his nightmares about her. The album is closed with two surprises, both lyrically and musically. Lyrically Silberman hints at a welcome memory in penultimate line ‘but you return to me at night just when I think I might have fallen asleep’ but then undermines the image and emphasises the endless conflict in his feelings towards her, even after death, with closing lyrics ‘your face is up against mine and I’m too terrified to speak’. Musically, the guitar drops away to a single fuzzy synth-line, effectively distilling the emotional weight of a lifetime into a single melodic line. It’s a perfect end to a near-perfect album, a release that deserves to be heard time and time again because its depths are so rewarding, and that has earned my undying appreciation for an emotional maturity, precision, and weight practically unheard in today’s Indie Rock scene.

9.5/10

4 Great albums for winter:

Intro

#1 - Spiritualized

#2 - The Antlers
#3 - Beach House
#4 - Joanna Newsom

4 Great Albums for Winter: #1 Spiritualized

Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space

Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space

I Think I'm In Love

Broken Heart

Cool Waves

Ladies and Gentlemen isn’t just an album, it’s an odyssey. Anyone who has spent a lot of time with Spiritualized’s greatest release will understand what a mammoth undertaking it is to take these songs apart and discuss them. It’s a profoundly moving album showing consistently excellent musicianship across the board, and describes a tight narrative arc across its twelve songs. The main theme here is addiction and loss, in relation to both love and drugs. As a result, the album is a series of wired highs and crushing lows, interpretable either as the peaks and troughs of an intensely passionate romance or the transcendent highs and desperate comedowns of a heroin addict’s life. The whole piece could be seen as a masterful expansion of the musical and lyrical ideas displayed in The Velvet Underground’s seminal Heroin, of a near-powerless and desperately delusional man trying to grapple with forces far stronger than himself, the intensity of his love and the complicated relationship with his drug of choice. Adding to this the real-life story of frontman (and open ex-addict) Jason Pierce losing his girlfriend Kate Radley to The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft in a secret wedding, Radley’s role on the keys and her iconic opening vocal sample seem all the realer, more painful, and more human.

The varied musical styles across the album are enough to make anyone fall in love, with Jason Pierce commanding a full band and even a gospel choir to chart countless corners of the rock spectrum, from Come Together’s thrashing hard rock to the heart-wrenching classical-tinged ballad Broken Heart. Along the way he encounters genres such as blues and jazz, and uses the classic ‘freak-out’ in songs like All of My Thoughts and Cop Shoot Cop... to depict the mad, out-of-control highs and contrast them with more the more considered instrumentation representing normal life. The music in these songs tells just as much of the story as the raw and affecting lyrics; take for example Home of the Brave, the complex self-pitying comedown after Electricity’s crazy high where confessional lyrics like open wounds and a pathetic yet hopeful vocal refrain are slowly choked by a wash of raw instrumental noise, rising unstoppably into the next drug-fuelled peak of the album. Elsewhere look to the superb swung lullaby Stay With Me, where a blissed-out Pierce intones ‘I love the way you’re mine’ and the gentle guitars cocoon the listeners with Pierce in his bubble of denial aand delusion.

The music keeps the album endlessly exciting and innovative, and there is far more to say than I could possibly write in a single article, but it is still in the lyrical content that Pierce packs his heavier emotional punches. Unlike a number of other writers on this list who appeal to the listener through complex poetry and imagery, Pierce goes straight for the jugular, relying on the rawness of his words and the undying sincerity of his vocal style to appeal to the listener’s emotions. And god, does it work. It’s completely impossible to comment on all the amazing ways Pierce uses his words to really make the listener feel with an uncommon intensity, but I can certainly try and pick out a few favourite moments. He is a master of creating simple phrases that will stay with you long after the song has finished, such as the beautiful line that repeats all the way through the title track, ‘all I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away’. In other places he shows himself near-poetic in his style, such as the schizophrenic call-and-reply in the second half of the drugged-up and jazzy I Think I’m In Love. For nearly two minutes he calls out his most optimistic feelings and thoughts and rapidly undermines each one in quick, cutting phrases; ‘I think I can fly / probably just falling / think i’m the life and soul / probably just snorting...think i’m alive / probably just breathing / think you stole my heart now, baby / probably just thieving’. It’s a masterful lyrical section that affects the listener both through its concise and pointed form and through the tragic truths of his situation.

When Pierce really wants to break the listener down, he does it with beguiling simplicity. A few of the tracks here are enough to make anyone cry, as in the hopeless monotone of comedown anthem Home of the Brave; ‘sometimes have my breakfast right off of the mirror / and sometimes I have it right out of a bottle...I’m gonna rip it off / tear it out / got to get it off of my soul’. The saddest song in the collection is also the very lowest point of Pierce’s intense emotional journey, where all the guitars and jazzy instruments drop away for the pure strings and organ-keys of the tragic Broken Heart. In this suffocatingly atmospheric ballad, Pierce contemplates the impossibility of action in his heartbroken state; ‘I have a broken heart / I’m too busy to be heartbroken / Lord I have a broken heart’. It’s deceptively simple but these vocals will pierce straight through to the heart of any but the coldest of listeners, resulting in a song of uncommon power.

This is an album where each track deserves to be given a huge amount of time, because each in their own way adds brilliantly to the story that Ladies and Gentlemen tells. And though every listener will have their favourites, for me the penultimate song Cool Waves is the best of all. Pierce again employs the sweetest and simplest lyrics in this love song about letting go; “Baby when you gotta sleep, lay your head down low / don’t let the world lay heavy on your soul / ‘cuz when you gotta sleep, you gotta sleep”. Each verse is beautiful and direct, and the transcendent chorus is a sad testament to a love that can never be, and the nobility of the lover who knows when to let go; “Babe you know you gotta be, and let your light shine through / and let your light shine through / and don’t let anybody tell you what to do / ‘cuz babe you gotta be, you gotta be”.

This wonderful track leads into the complex closing epic Cop Shoot Cop... which ends the album on a very ambiguous note, combining wry lyricism (“hey ma, there’s a hole in my arm where all the money goes / Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose”) with large-scale freak-outs reminding us of the hits and comedowns we’ve experience across the album.  It’s a perfect ending to a perfect album, and there’s not really alot more to be said. If you haven’t heard this masterpiece, I recommend you go out and get it immediately. If you have heard it, then you probably love it, and I suggest now’s as good a time as any to dive back in.

10/10


4 Great albums for winter:
Intro
#1 - Spiritualized
#2 - The Antlers
#3 - Beach House
#4 - Joanna Newsom

Video of the Week: The Flaming Lips - Powerless

For the second installation of my new video feature, I’ve chosen The Flaming Lips’ curious and beautiful video for Powerless¸ from their 2009 album Embryonic. In last week’s video I discussed how the visual can be tied to the musical in order to create an emotional effect, but here I’m focussing more on the aesthetics of a music video, and how vague symbols can be used to resonate with a wide audience.

The most obvious comment to be made here is that the video has an utterly unique visual tone, with a muted colour palette and extraordinary shots, often incorporating clever lens flares to give a sense of the heat and isolation of the woman’s situation. Aside from looking lush and visually striking, the video also appears to make an ambiguous point about the concept of power. The woman is intensely sexualised from the very start, wearing a tee shirt and tiny hot pants, with the occasional crotch-shot adding to the image. This sexuality is juxtaposed slightly unappealingly by the fact that she is tied up and trying to get free, creating the idea of a sexual object without any freedom. Then added to the situation is the monkey staring at her, perhaps symbolising the masculine oppressor watching over her, perhaps there’s an alternate reading of its role too. As Coyne intones “No one is ever really powerless” she calms and begins a transformation in perfect timing with the taut guitar riffs, and the visual effect of her body essentially glitching and transforming is a very arresting one. Transformation complete, she is no longer tied up, and desperately claws her way from her restraints and flees, dancing and rejoicing in her new freedom of movement. However, although she acts as if she is now free she does not take off her blindfold, and she is still watched over by her simian oppressor. Is this freedom or just an illusion of freedom in a wider prison? Either way, the video is extraordinary in its visual atmosphere, as well as giving you a lot to chew on intellectually, even if it doesn’t give any concrete answers.

Feature: The National – Reflections and Reviews for 3 albums

The National's ascent to indie-rock stardom has rightly been the subject of much critical interest. In an age where the band is a dying formula and generic rockers stretch their sound further to the extremities of the genre in order to garner notice here is a band's band; a guitar-bass-vocalist-drum outfit who have crafted a unique sound that does not try to escape rock but defines it, and more importantly who have created album after album of fantastic and profound rock songs. Their first two albums, The National and Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers, were good warm-ups for the full-scale assault the band were about to launch on the music industry, the latter album especially containing some really standout tracks, but in this article I will be concerning myself with their three most recent LPs; Alligator, Boxer and High Violet.

Matt Berninger is the frontman and lyricist of the band, imbuing each track with the weight of his deep woody baritone and the often spectacular skill he brings to crafting the band's lyrics. His voice is definitely worth more than a passing mention, because I'll be the first to admit that the sound of The National is not the most immediately arresting; on first listen nothing appears particularly different about the music but on repeated spins of each album one hears not only the taut instrumentation which perfectly compliments the individual mood of the tracks, but also Berninger's lyrics open up a world of fatigue, urban alienation, and a nuanced insight into the desperate plight of the white middle-class American man.

Alligator

Baby We'll Be Fine

In the ballad of the deluded worker Baby We'll Be Fine on Alligator, Berninger reassures “All we've gotta do is be brave / and be kind”, and this line is symbolic of something he does so well- we don't believe this and neither does the persona (immediately after repeatedly apologizing profusely to his lover) but it is still said, as if desperate repetition can somehow make something true that every person feels should be true, all the while highlighting the massive undermining of expectations a 30-something New Yorker must confront in the face of the shining unattainable beacon of the American dream. Alligator deals the reader snapshots of men trying to cope and understand the shockingly modern and disappointing world around them, and every aspect of the music is precision-built to further the hollow emotion that represents the fallout of these ideals.

Arguably the album is the most musically varied of the three. Don't get me wrong, this is all indie rock, and closer Mr November is pretty much as indie rock as you can get, but the band suit these stories to soundtracks as diverse as the screaming explanatory chorus of Abel, “My mind's not right”, to the quiet and supremely beautiful tragedy of firelight ballad Val Jester all within the same cohesive sonic sphere, and this is a fantastic accomplishment in itself. However what really elevates The National in my mind is whilst focusing on crafting the perfect aural achievement of their themes and emotions they never lose sight of an all-important pop sensibility: I defy you to not sing along to the chorus of Karen once you know it.

City Middle

Many of the songs on the album deal with the disillusionment of the worker at a particular crisis-point in his life. Late track City Middle depicts in subtle imagery a middle-aged married man taking drugs and sleeping with young girls whilst being haunted by memories of the wife he loves and her fatigue from the routine that has set in upon their life. The chorus is light and airy showing the allure of this life, whilst the sombre throb of the last verse contrasts with the wife's repeated cries of becoming overwhelmed. However beyond these clever musical tricks Berninger never forgets to treat his carefully crafted characters with a light touch; these songs never get too serious. In his memory of her “in long red socks and red shoes” the evocative visual imagery is coupled with a humorous image of “you, pissing in a sink I think”, harking back to the excitement of their early love and all the while making sure the track never becomes too heavy. Friend Of Mine's insanely catchy refrain directed to the boss of a friend who is preventing the friends from meeting “Why do you listen to that man / that man's a balloon” is funny but the narrator's admission “I've got two sets of headphones / I miss you like hell” is a concise evocation of loneliness alongside the history of a friendship weighing down upon its present, a universal feeling that comes across all the stronger for its marriage to Berninger's humorous touches while displaying his unnatural ability to say so much in a throwaway line.

Looking for Astronauts

However, some songs on these albums take a stronger stance in a social direction. Looking For Astronauts tells of a man who has dreamed his life away while damning what Sylvia Plath calls America's greatest tragedy - “the expectancy of conformity”: in that a man can get to the stage where he must say “are we gone?” (in other words 'is it now too late for us to find our way, having taken a different path to the rest'). In telling this story he draws in through his “medium sized American heart” the crushing of individuality and emotional expression through failing to achieve the impossible goals set in contemporary life, ending with a side-swipe at news media's impact on American mentality where “that's all we want / something to cry for / and something to hunt”. This is all powered by a regular beat and pacing guitars that show a mind at work while the lyrics express the complexity of the themes. However, The National do not always stick on Alligator to being a band driven by lyrics.

Val Jester

This is most clear on the album's most emotive tracks, such as Daughters Of The Soho Riots and Val Jester. In the former, a slow melody plays across the narrator's love story set in a time of civil upheaval, and the looser pacing allows lines like “break my arms around the one I love” to shine through as a perfectly self-contained image of the sacrifices we all make for love. In Val Jester it is even clearer that instrumentation is not an afterthought; while Berninger intones the difficult acceptance of a child leaving home in beautiful and striking imagery such as “fill her coat with weapons / and help her get it on / because one day when she goes / she's gone”, it is the grieving violin that will make you want to cry, and the quiet build-up of percussion that helps you understand that the sombre and curious emotions being expressed here are merely a part of everyday life filtered through the band's unique lyrical and sonic poetry.

Alligator is a subdued record, and this fact immediately places it in harsh contrast with the majority of the rest of indie rock, from the generic pop-rockers to genuinely brilliant but undeniably overstated bands like Neutral Milk Hotel. However the band's willingness to craft something so delicate and detailed creates an expectancy that the listener gives the album time and patience, and it is undeniably time well spent. Here Berninger and co set out a mission statement to report the inner struggles of those whose problems are not obvious with respect and craft, a goal they continue to pursue in the next album they released, Boxer.

Boxer

Fake Empire

Boxer was a consolidation rather than a radical step forward for The National, but in context it was consolidating a masterpiece with another one. Every aspect of this album has been tightened and tuned compared with Alligator, and their sound benefits enormously, resulting in a collection of songs staggering in both their craft and their consistency of quality across the LP that represents to my mind the dizzying peak of their career so far.

The album opens with the first of many superb tracks, Fake Empire. The semi-jaunty piano melody seems out of place compared to the volatility and extremes of emotions, particularly anger, portrayed in previous releases, but clearly demonstrates the song's theme of ignoring the ugliness in the world, focusing on the beautiful things to distract ourselves. It is soon undercut by Berninger's classic phrase “we're half awake in a fake empire” - a damning and concise perspective on the somnambulent and delusional everyday lives of the American middle class and for me the track proves an overture to the entire album in three distinct ways which I hope to examine.

Green Gloves

The first is painting in broad strokes the melancholy of these individual American adults, out of whom particular characters and circumstances will be picked out and realised with brilliant observational skill by Berninger's gorgeous voice and sharp lyrics all across the album. Some of these portraits are so acute they leave me starry-eyed in wonder, such as on the fantastically moving Green Gloves. The song tells the simple tale of a person exorcised from a friendship group who seeks to live vicariously through the experience of these former friends, with both the envy and the soft reverence of this physical betrayal into the lives of others denoted by the title. It all comes together in the haunting and faultless chorus “Get inside their clothes / with my green gloves / watch their videos / in their chairs”, Berninger sings in a tone one can only sympathise with, creating an image that is beautiful because of the way it is expressed. What this means is that as the chorus closes, “get inside their beds / with my green gloves / get inside their heads / love their loves” one does not wholly take the creepy image as the sole reading and instead the listener is left with a portrait of extreme loneliness, made all the more personal and moving because Berninger is singing about a process that is so deeply personal and secretive in its confession that the listener can only feel they are making the very same intrusion into the life of the narrator.

The second is the admirable and new sense of restraint on display here. Boxer succeeds because the band realised the sound of Alligator, while raw and evocative, was not sustainable, and so in focusing the subjects and toning down the harshness of the sound the band are able to treat their songs with a more sophisticated maturity in each track.

Mistaken For Strangers

However when the band do recapture their darker moments, such as on the menacing and brilliant Mistaken For Strangers, it's in a more mature light than previous efforts. The song deals with the sacrifice of individuality one must undergo in order to become a functioning working adult and entering into the corporate machine. The serious subject matter is backlit by the heaviest guitars on the album, turning lyrics of distanced meditation into a dark assault that paints de-individualisation as a real threat to the modern American man. The track also highlights Berninger's amazingly elastic wordplay, playing with existing imagery such as “make up something to believe in your heart of hearts / so you have something to wear on your sleeve of sleeves” and adding layer upon layer of nuance, turning an aphorism of emotional openness into a condemning perspective on the necessity of falsity of values in the working world. This play on words is highlighted again and again throughout the album, creating lines like the fantastically evocative “I leaned on the wall / the wall leaned away” in Slow Show. Yet when Berninger sticks to his own lyrical ideas he is still fantastic and shows more complexity than on Alligator. On Mistaken for Strangers he calls the descent into the faceless corporate life “another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults”, including the unexpected negatives to emphasise the undermining of expectations in entering the 'real world' after 20-odd years of education in the Western machine.

In other places on this album he continues to show a true mastery of his lyrics, in Start A War he states of his lover “You were always weird but I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now”, showing with simple and effective poetry the changes their relationship has undergone to reach this point. This track is the middle point of what could be seen as a three-part relationship story arc beginning with Apartment Story and ending with Guest Room, in which he states what may be one of the truest universal fears in any relationship - “We can't stay here / we're starting to stay the same”.

Slow Show

However for me the most poignant relationship track on the album is Slow Show, a portrait of a man who is simply unsure – about his job, his relationship and the directions his life has taken. The characterisation is superbly sympathetic, the narrator admitting “Oh God I'm very, very frightening” when describing how he wants to be with his lover in the sweet vignette “I wanna hurry home to you / put on a slow, dumb show for you / and crack you up”. The track is beautiful and interpretable, but most of all nearly every line is stunning; from the simple and funny line “everything I love gets lost in drawers” which is also so poignant, to his feelings of neutrality and unreaction to his circumstance; “you could drive a car through my head in five minutes/ from one side of it to the other.” The song ends with a piano section apparently played by Berninger's friend and fellow indie favourite Sufjan Stevens, and here the narrator's longing that takes its lines from the track 29 Years from The National's debut album “You know I dreamed about you / for 29 years before I saw you” is what truly melts your heart towards anyone who can still have such an idealized idea of love and wants more than anything for it to just work.

Gospel

The third change it denotes is a musical one, and that is the fact that Boxer is a remarkably percussive album, all started by the drums that kick sharply into the first half of this opener slightly more prominently in the mix than you'd expect and continue to drive the majority of the album through its course with a deft skill that paces Berninger's stories perfectly. And the true mark of their knowing skill at using more prominent percussion is when it finally drops for tear-jerking closer Gospel, a superbly nuanced examination of the disparity between the overseas war experience and how it is seen from the suburban home. Here Berninger shows subtly how the truth of war is softened in America in two ways. Firstly by its commercialisation and familiarity in US culture, “Invite me to the war every night of the summer” he sings, turning it into a social occasion bearing no similarity to the horrific experience itself which he hints at with the suggestion “we'll play G.I Blood”; contorting the war experience into the grotesque toyings of a child. In the refrain he softly requests from his love “Darling can you tie my string”, bringing the physical intimacy of a relationship to the uniformed harshness of war before intoning breathily “killers are calling on me”. It is the aural peace of his phrase that renders it so incongruous and moving, which couldn't at all be possible if it wasn't for the warm guitar notes without a trace of a drumline; showing the band at the very height not only of mastering their instruments but also with an acute awareness of when less is more.

If I talked in this feature about every track as much as I wanted to it would go on forever, but suffice to say in Boxer almost all of the songs are brilliant, and when they aren't they're still exceptional. I feel I need to say that the album does slightly lack the musical range and a touch of the poppiness of Alligator, but this is clearly a necessary sacrifice for the ever-lucid songwriting and composition that time after time is effortlessly masterful across the album. It was three years before The National released their next LP with only a brief EP to keep the fans interested, and when High Violet finally came it proved a band still on top of the game and more importantly, still willing to change.

High Violet

By the time High Violet was released, The National were officially a big indie rock band on the map, and so there was a whole new world of expectations heaped upon their new record. However after 3 long years of waiting the album shows more than ever that this is a band born to exceed expectations. After first listen it is immediately clear that High Violet is a grander epxerience, here they play with more abstract lyrical themes that still convey the same complexity of themes and emotions, as well as enormously increasing the range of musical composition and detail of production throughout. Although it's not a completely new direction for the band I'm not sure that's really what anyone wanted, and the album is surely different enough to warrant a lot of admiration when they so easily could have put out another Boxer. It's barely worth saying that this album is another grower, however much the band members dislike the idea, any fans of the band ought to know by now that a new release is worth at least a week or so of listening before even beginning to form a judgement. And just as before, their music reveals itself at its own pace, proudly unveiling layer after exquisite layer of beautiful instrumentals and genius lyrics that often hit uncomfortably close to home.

Conversation 16

The most obvious changes that have taken place are musical ones. Opener Terrible Love is accompanied by a distorted wash of messy guitars that sounds messy, raw and unexpected while somehow perfectly suiting The National's canonical sound. Also notably Bryan Devendorf firmly cements himself as the best drummer in indie music, from the brilliant pacing of Anyone's Ghost to the tense percussion of Conversation 16 the drums carry over from Boxer an uncommon and brilliant prominence in the mix. Making a welcome return from Alligator are Berninger's more unusual vocal turns which Boxer quelled. On that third album he screamed through Abel and belted out Mr November and here we have the perfect multi-tracked vocals closing Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks and the winningly evocative close of Afraid of Everyone, “Your voice is swallowing my so-so-so-soul”, where the repetition of the first syllable aurally demonstrates the narrator's feeling of the loss of his identity painted by the lyrics themselves. Elsewhere Little Faith begins with guitars tuned to sound like machines and closes with distant piano notes in one of the most brilliant and nuanced musical additions to the album. What is most remarkable of all is that despite all this musical detail the band still manage to be subtle rather than showy, always applying new techniques with a taste and restraint so unusual in contemporary music.

In an interview just before its release, multi-instrumentalist and chief songwriter besides Berninger Aaron Dessner said “it became more of a record that was about texture and different colours”. If the new musical styles are the competing and intertwining textures, colours are certainly apparent in the lyrics, from the “silver city where all the silver girls gave us black dreams” in Conversation 16, the “red Southern souls” of Little Faith and the “blue bodies” and “red violets” of Afraid of Everyone we see colour both in the words and in the lyrical and musical evocations of the tracks themselves; the dusty red heat of Bloodbuzz Ohio and the magisterial hues of England.

Bloodbuzz Ohio

Beyond these motifs The National are looking at the same themes; social issues are once more brought to the fore in some of these tracks. Lemonworld deals with upper-class guilt in a fabricated world where one can escape from the horrors of the outside world (recalling the themes of Fake Empire), a place the title shows as sunny and self-contained but fundamentally sour. He shows self-importance, “it'll take a better war to kill a college man like me”, that mingles with an inability to wholly embrace the superiority of this world and its false splendour; “this pricey stuff makes me dizzy / I guess I've always been a delicate man”. Bloodbuzz Ohio's refrain sums up the American economic situation in one concise swoop - “I still owe money / to the money / to the money I owe”, and Conversation 16's humorous choral line “I was afraid I'd eat your brains / 'cuz I'm evil” emphasises the real fear that once one is stuck in the urban corporate machine it is all too easy to become zombified. A notable lyrical change in general is that although these are still often first-person tales they are less personal and more universal, more about America than the single people who live there, and so here the lyrics up the stakes onto a broader canvas just as the instrumentation does.

Anyone's Ghost

This is not to say these songs are emotionless. Anyone's Ghost is the story of a man whose lover is dodging him and has given him up even though he believes he was up to her high standards. His vindication that he was indeed up to the task are expressed brilliantly in short call-and-replies inserted into the metre of individual lines; “You said it was not inside my heart, it was / you said it should tear a kid apart, it does” he asserts midway through the track. The walk of the unrequited lover is beautifully evoked in the first verse “go out at night with your headphones on again / and walk through the Manhattan valleys of the dead” showing Berninger can still tug at the heart-strings when he wants to; even clearer in the universally sympathisable chorus line “I don't want anybody else” which the whole band sings together for emphasis. Yet again, the emotional effect is a triumph of both lyrics and form, as this track would be nothing without the harsh beats of the drums or the tensely jittering guitars that slide around the end of the track and close it with a shudder.

Sorrow

My personal favourite on the emotional stakes is second track, Sorrow. The first line “Sorrow found me when I was young / Sorrow waited, Sorrow won” is a personification of the bleakest kind, yet Berninger chooses to make this track about more than a depressive rut, as showcased in the stunning chorus where the narrator states “don't leave my hyper-heart alone on the water / cover me in rag and bone sympathy / 'cuz I don't wanna get over you”. Here we see a depressive man who has lost in love and is crying out that despite his depression, he needs company more than anything. The haunting choir voices at the end bring a profound emotional depth to the track, and it stands out as one of the most moving on the album. Runaway is another emotive powerhouse, this time more distant and reserved in the ballad form, with Berninger winningly crying out “What makes you think I'm enjoying being led to the flood?” to express the conflict between sticking out a relationship, whether familial or romantic, or leaving it behind. The real triumph here is that despite the notable lyrical abstraction, especially present in the taking away of the little personal details of the characters in previous tracks, Berninger's lyrics are still endlessly relatable and often uncommonly moving.

If I have one criticism of this album, it's that it clearly lacks the unshakable consistency of the previous two, especially Boxer. With the new grandness comes a slight tendency to become overblown, such as in anthemic closer Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks and mood-setting opener Terrible Love that is more atmosphere than meaning. These are my personal pick of more disappointing tracks, and though these may be the favourites of others I have noticed that whichever songs come up as duds in your own listening, there is a consensus in that there are a few more here than in Alligator and Boxer.

However I must underline that this is a minor qualm when it is so unusual for a band to release another record that not only has so many moments of brilliance but also tries so many new directions. The National continue to improve over every release, and in High Violet they have crafted a sprawling and dynamic record in which the quality far supercedes any worries about consistency issues or an unremitting bleakness. It's the highest compliment you can pay a band of this stature that with High Violet they have made good on all the promises that Boxer made, while quietly redrawing their musical style in the process.

Scores and next steps

As this feature has in part been a review, I'm going to give the standard x.y/10 score to each of the albums, but the ratings will be more personal than my normal fare because of the nature of the feature.

Alligator – 9/10

Boxer – 9.5/10

High Violet – 9/10

The band have clearly improved over each album, but this doesn't necessarily mean that the scores should only go up with each consecutive release. Each record is a brilliant piece of music but for me the mixture of the personal touches in Alligator and the extraordinary quality of High Violet gives Boxer the edge and so it gets the top spot for me.

High Violet marked more of a new sound than Boxer did for Alligator, and so its slight consistency problems could either denote a misstep or a sound that needs to settle for its true brilliance to be unearthed. At the moment, I'm inclined to believe the latter, as the band have shown superb musicianship in understanding that an audience needs something fresh from each release while remaining aware that this should not detract from the quality of each individual record. All we can do is wait for the next album to see how they're going to fare now the band is more under the critics' and audience's spotlight than ever.

The National's career has proven to all indie rock hopefuls that the genre is far from dead, and they stand alone on the scene as a band unwilling to compromise quality for quirks and tricks. They have always been a straight-up band's band, and from such a brilliant backlog I think we have every right to expect the best from the next release.

Chromatics – Night Drive

To make a departure from a lo-fi punk sound and decide that in fact, stripped down italo-disco is the way to go is an ambitious move, so it was anyone's guess how Chromatics, an Oregon-based band, would fare with their latest release. And to their credit, this band has taken a new direction and really flung themselves into it, releasing a great throwback record whilst intelligently ignoring the wry smile that so often accompanies the retro-pastiche album.

Ruth Radelet's half-drugged vocals haunt the album, opening the LP with a telephone call that introduces the driving-at-night atmosphere that these tracks pursue. The thick double-layering of her voice at all time evokes seedy streets and reflected neon signs, but what really makes this album work is the attention to detail shown throughout in the instrumentation. Too often standard-formation bands rely too heavily on vocals and use instrumentals as a backing track, but here Chromatics have clearly taken their disco charge seriously.

The album trades in crisp cheap-sounding beats (in a good way) and smoky hook-laden riffs, creating dark, syrup-thick layers that court Radelet's vocals flawlessly throughout. One of the generously-strewn highlights is third cut I Want Your Love, which is surprisingly long for a poppy track but never meanders. Opening with a taut plucked riff, a bass throb introduces Radelet's obliquely steamed-up vocals, the atmosphere is palpable. Her insanely catchy vocal refrain 'I want your love' showcases perfectly the curious combination of longing and disinterest in her singing, sort of a disco-Nico for the noughties.

A real triumph of this album is the approach to a sound that references the past so heavily, as noted earlier. Instead of a half-ironic collage of disco styles, the band has clearly thought about how to adapt italo-disco for the new generation, and in stripping down any excess from the sound they have crafted an addictive, tense and minimal approach that works perfectly. This is shown in another album highlight, Kate Bush cover Running Up That Hill which is effectively three repeated chords and some light percussion, with Radelet's voice soaring above to synthed-out strings. It's simple, but it's beautifully crafted and the sparse feel leaves these elements open to be taken seriously and as they are; this is music unmasked and in stripping away all that noise you're left with great riffs and candy-sweet vocal hooks that make this a difficult album to stop listening to.

Admittedly the album sometimes takes a wrong step. While The Killing Spree is a successful creepy murder-vision instrumental and Let's Make This A Moment To Remember is a skilful slow-groove wordless disco tune, final 17 minute instrumental Tick of the Clock is a techno misstep that almost works but ultimately recedes into the background before interest can really take hold. Similarly Tomorrow Is So Far Away has a great, threatening atmosphere that doesn't quite keep the song interesting for its entire 7 minute playlength.

However these negatives pale in comparison to the sheer volume of great tracks on the album. I've already mentioned the first three but Healer is a great cut with a storming post-punk guitar riff and a deliciously heavy feel, whilst Mask has one of the catchiest choruses on the LP and a joyous untreated synth noise that raises its head every so often to great effect.

Because of its appropriation of old textures and genre, this album doesn't sound totally unique. It's not perfect either, occasionally tracks overstay their welcome. But this album is a surprisingly bold and consistent move in a new direction for this band, and its real triumph is something that artists too often forget in trying to craft something new or conceptually complex: this is an album full of atmospheric and endlessly satisfying songs that you'll find it hard to turn it off. In some ways, there's no higher praise.

7.5/10

Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest

You don't always have to make something blindingly original to create great music. Some bands recently like Arcade Fire have shown that there's still life in the seemingly staid genre of indie rock, and Grizzly Bear go some way to consolidating this proof; this album is lush and pretty, and in equal parts brilliant and frustrating.

In their formative albums Grizzly Bear showed off the various aspects that could be expected in their music, and all of those are present here. The perfect vocal harmonies, richly textured instrumentals and generally an uplifting and relaxed tone permeates their music, and for the most part these tried and tested features make for a satisfying product. Opener Southern Point is a taut and structurally complex journey with propulsive guitars and a stunning drive that opens out into a broad and rich soundscape. Early highlight and second cut Two Weeks is a genuine summer anthem, a simple piano line (which curiously bears more than a passing resemblance to a slowed down version of the backing in Dre and Snoop's Still D.R.E) swells with gorgeous harmonies and a melancholic vocal melody; it's sharp, well composed and positively infectious.

When Grizzly Bear are assured and know what they're doing, the tracks really do shine. Cheerleader haunts the listener with a throbbing bassline; Ready, Able is a tense composition that threatens to blossom into a lush soundscape so many times that when it finally does, the payoff is immense. Yet too often on this record the band seem to lose their way. Indeed, when listened to in one go, many of the tracks on the album are indistinguishable from others unless you pay close attention. All We Ask crawls along for 5 minutes with a predictable payoff, Dory transitions so many times into different melodies that it completely gets lost, and the crashing crescendo of I Live With You just sounds kind of off; the normally delicate instrumentation all coming down at once in a very heavy-handed manner.

After a long listen, I'm just left wondering if they couldn't deviate more whole-heartedly from the formula that they've established; previous album Yellow House showcased a great deal more variation than this album. Granted this is a richer and more fully-formed offering, but slick production values can't hold as much weight as good songwriting. It's a shame that some of these tracks can get murky and bothersome, because there's some really great stuff here. While You Wait For The Others is very possibly the best track the band have ever written (rivalling Colorado and Knife from their last LP); an expertly sparse and minimal composition with great harmonies and the most interesting and poetic lyrics that the group have come out with. Meanwhile closer Foreground is a piano-based composition of rare beauty. Melancholy and exquisitely textured, it really doesn't go on long enough. And I don't mean that like 'I could listen to it forever because it's so good'; I genuinely think the song is cut somewhat short. I would've preferred for the last song to take the form of a long exhale after the whole, and it could really have been taken further. But maybe that's just me, anyway. I do still love the track.

Veckatimest is a fantastically accomplished album in terms of intelligent use of melody and lushly textured tracks, but it's a shame that they couldn't keep up the consistency by making each song audibly unique from the rest. Yet Grizzly Bear are still one of the most brilliant and satisfying indie rock outfits around at the moment, so let's hope they can get the balance right next time.

7.5/10

Why? - Elephant Eyelash

Coming from a background of anticon's experimental Hip-Hop groups like cLOUDDEAD and Hymie's Basement, Yoni Wolf's project Why? was never going to make conventional indie-rock. Although all of Why's releases are solid albums, all suffer from the same problems – inconsistency and general lack of range. But that's why I'm reviewing this album, his first, as it shows the greatest range and variation in composition mixed with his always excellent and evocative lyrics; it's the best showcase for how the band works.

The music to these tracks is nothing particularly new. There is a lo-fi fuzz to most of the songs that gives them a pleasant DIY aesthetic, and although the guitar riffs aren't especially original they're never less than compelling and catchy, generally helped along by a stray piano or bass that rounds off the sound. But really, the reason you listen to Why? is because of his lyrics. His vocals are distinctly white and nasal which contrasts rather magnificently on first listen with the way he hurls his voice around, tripping over with Hip-Hop flow in one verse and yowling out with overblown emotion in the next. His writing is always tremendously evocative, whether unveiling his distinctive sense of humour in tracks like Yo Yo Bye Bye; “You get stoned like death in the bible” or when he's hurling out wonderful obscenities like “What do you dream up when I tongue you down” in Gemini (Birthday Song).

Added to this, the first half of the album is consistently enjoyable. Opener Crushed Bones sets the scene perfectly, his vocals tumbling over each other in a humorous self-referential track about the pressures of being an artist in contact with a label and the toil that travel takes when touring. His first line “To inhaling crushed bones through a dried-out white pen” showcases all the individual facets that make his writing so engaging; he turns drugs and sex into obliquely funny poetry while engaging with more serious issues on occasion. Added to this, he has a knack for extraordinarily catchy vocal choruses; “And us in fish net hats / and canvas shoes as was the style that year” is a seemingly simple line that nevertheless will remain lodged in your head for days. The next few tracks keep up the quality; Yo Yo Bye Bye is a more sombre song about a break-up in which some of his more serious lines are kept afloat by his mastery of language and his ability to switch the tone of his voice perfectly to suit the feeling implied; funny turns to deep in the space of a line when he switches from puns to a call out “The Monterey birches were bare / raising their skinny arms out to the sky in surrender / we have to change if we're going to stay together” - you really feel for him through the occasional isolating beauty of his language. Following this Rubber Traits is a hook-laden pop track with some magnificent verses such as “Unfold an origami death mask /and cut my DNA with rubber traits / pull apart the double helix like a wishbone / always be working on a suicide note”; his lyrics rarely fail to hit a sweet spot between funny and profound.

Unfortunately the album just can't quite keep up this momentum. The Hoofs and Fall Saddles are nice enough but don't quite pack the punch as the previous tracks with their slighter compositions (although the chorus of Fall Saddles does drop quite satisfyingly). Waterfalls is an interestingly lo-fi approach but the scratchiness of the instrumentals isn't quite successful and sounds too difficult for an album that generally deals in easy hooks and sounds attached to more complex lyrics; it doesn't quite work so well the other way round. Gemini (Birthday Song) and Sand Dollars again are quite good tracks, but they just don't really have the strength of earlier songs.

Thankfully the last two tracks are both absolute knock-outs. Act Five has one of the best guitar melodies on the LP with a great distortion effect plied liberally throughout the track. The vocals switch up tones rapidly and the metaphor of the final act of a play as the final age of someone's life works well. The track really hits the spot; “All the people who taught me card tricks are dying / I've been trying to get my pop-pop's good looks from old snapshots” is both haunting and slyly funny; showing Wolf's lyrics at their subtlest. Final cut Light Leaves is an undeniable album highlight, the first thing you notice is that the aesthetically difficult combination of sharp guitar janglings and his nasal vocals just isn't present on this track, the two come together very beautifully, and this is without doubt because this is the most serious and philosophical track on the album. It's a discussion of death in modern society, and lines like “and if you do leave the earth / when the earth leaves you” ask some very serious questions. The entire song probes a depth that none of the other tracks do, and it makes one wonder why these themes aren't discussed further in the rest of the album. Granted humour is a big part of his thing, but if Wolf can write like this, it would be nice to see more of it.

This album has some absolutely stellar tracks on it, particularly the first and last few, but droops heavily in the middle. There isn't a whole lot of range on display which is also slightly disappointing; but this is still more interesting than all but the most out-there indie rock outfits. So I'm not saying it's an excellent album, but give it a try because you may find a whole lot to like.

7.5/10

The Microphones – The Glow pt 2

I'm finding this a very difficult review to write, pretty much for one sole reason: I really want to give this album 10/10. I regard it as an extraordinary release and it has been one of my personal favourites almost since I first heard it. Now you've probably already looked down and seen that it didn't quite get there, so allow me the space of the review to explain my thoughts on this beautiful and complex album.

Unusually, I'm going to start with the negative and move onto the positive, it just seems a more sensible to go about reviewing this album. So here goes: this is a very dense and difficult listen. Although almost entirely the work of Phil Elverum with conventional instruments, it doesn't help the listener to understand it. The album is a long piece, and each track requires a dedicated listen, preferably through headphones. Vocals are often drowned by rushes of instrumentals, leaving you scouring lyrics sites to find out just what he's saying. The actual composition is frequently jarring even though it is quite simply put together, with a light and airy track such as I Felt Your Size transitioning into the monstrous Samurai Sword without any sort of warning to the listener. Each track will take repeated listens firstly to understand, and then probably even more if you want to like them.

But it's more than worth the effort. On repeated listens almost every track unfurls into a beautiful piece, expertly composed with astonishingly profound and poetic lyrics. Elverum created the entire album on cassettes in the old-fashioned analogue style, which not only makes the effort more laudable but also adds a lovely lo-fi texture to the instrumentals. Elverum's subject is almost invariably the vastness of nature and a ceaseless quest into just how he fits into everything; into the natural world around him, into his own body, and into existence itself. Opener I Want Wind To Blow starts easily, with recognisably folky guitar melodies and light percussion. The deceptively simple lyrics discuss feeling out of touch with the natural world, and without fail Elverum expresses himself beautifully, each word expertly plucked and sung with a true weight of meaning. His voice may sound like an all-American drawl but the vocal melodies are brilliantly implemented throughout not just this track but the entire album. The sweet song ends with a long and lushly orchestrated instrumental that suddenly begins to crash all around with booming percussion as it leads into title track and album highlight The Glow Pt. 2. His vocals take on a desolate longing, this song is just about living, and what that really means. He sings over organs, drums and guitars timed exquisitely to emphasise the complex questions and ideas that his poetic lyrics raise. When he sings “my blood flows harshly”, the word 'blood' is stretched to almost 10 seconds in length, and though it may seem weird, this is a man grappling with his own existence, confounded by the physicality of his own body, asking just why it is that he is alive. The elongation is not just acceptable, it is demanded by the weight of these concepts. This track ebbs into third cut (and another stunner) The Moon, where after a short instrumental a rushing percussion all but drowns out every single line he sings. But go and look up these lyrics, because they are simple and exquisite- Elverum here tells a story about returning to a place he used to visit with a lover.

It's very hard to explain just what makes each of these tracks so special, and I could happily go on describing each of these twenty songs in even more detail than I have for the three above. The music could be said to be difficult but it is more a case of the instrumentation being uncompromisingly focussed on the subject of the songs themselves, not pandering to a poppy aesthetic. But once you get to the bottom of these tracks, they could even be described as catchy, thickly-veiled pop songs. There are two tracks titled Instrumental and both are stunning, particularly the gorgeous piano on the first one. Headless Horseman, My Roots Are Strong And Deep, You'll Be In The Air and I Felt Your Size are easier listens, and all use a simple metaphor to discuss sophisticated issues of life and love. Other tracks such as The Mansion, The Gleam pt. 2 and Samurai Sword are less inviting, but each track has so much to explore. His lyrics chart the totality of life across the beautiful soundscapes which perfectly express the gorgeous, cruel and exacting natural world that Elverum finds himself in the middle of.

I believe that every single track on this album is worth a dedicated listen, and each is extremely rewarding in its unpacking. However I know that some may find it a difficult and unapproachable listen, and more to the point a lot of people don't want listening to music to be an effort. That's completely fair enough, but this album rewards devoted listeners with more beauty and meaning than almost any other I've come across. So give it a listen, and if it happens to pique your interest then I can assure you that you are on to an album of boundless beauty and quality.

9.5/10