The Benja-man Is Verbose

You know how it is.   You’re listening to a record for the first time and you’re trying to put together a narrative, and since you don’t remember the songs all that well but are trying to have something to say, you make sweeping statements about how things be.   Well, I’m going to have to slightly walk a few things back.   Last time I described Boxer as basically a pleasant blur of mid-tempo soundscapes and concluded that this was basically the mode that the National operate best in, and slightly bemoaned that they’d never be the band I’d go to to rock out.   Well, this listen through, “Fake Empire” played out about the way I remembered, with a great twisty piano line and a straightforward vocal melody.   It’s not a different type of song than, say, “Wasp Nest,” except for the part where “Fake Empire” is actually enjoyable to listen to – it just does their thing better.   So I was in that mode of expecting moody stuff and briefly wondered if the second track, “Mistaken For Stranger

Now sans the Kirstler brothers, but with Päde Kistler on bagpipes and vocals, here's another Eluveitie record!  I obviously wasn’t listening at the time so I don't know how this was received – a band that previously fit closer to death metal than anything else is now releasing an acoustic female-fronted record sung only in Gaulish that’s part one of a two part story?   Um...?   For what it’s worth, scrolling through reviews from the time suggests that acoustic records were all the rage at the time, and that Eluveitie were actually making a very expected move similar to what some of their peers in the folk-infused metal world were already doing.   I’m arbitrarily making the rule that when this band engages in its “folk” side and does a record with no English, I’m not required to do the same track-by-track breakdown I do for their “metal” side.   That way I can focus on the listening experience.   (And that helps me out because then I don’t have to make comments about a trac

I previously quipped that repeating the same thing over and over doesn't necessarily make it a hook, but whenever I think about the National now my brain has the unfortunate tendency to start humming "we're out looking for astronauts, looking for astronauts, we're out looking for astronauts, looking for astronauts" over and over and over and over.  It's one of those fairly unpleasant earworms.  Sometimes I can make it go away by switching to the "we'll get away with it" part from "The Geese Of Beverly Road," and that's better.  It is high time to move on with this little project!   And so we move on to a record that generally seems to be regarded as the start of the band's peak.   This record is when they started charting regularly - not top ten yet or anything, but somewhere in the Billboard list - and becoming better known as critics' darlings.  It's sort of the record we’ve been building up to, as after throwing a f