THE NATIONAL - Boxer (2007), listen #1
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 few variations against the wall over the course of the last few, the National on Boxer sound like a band that has made a “final” (for now) decision on which parts of its sound it does or does not want to lean into. My first impression was enjoying the swirling keys of "Fake Empire" and then outright grinning when a horn section suddenly broke out towards the end of the song. Keys play a big part throughout Boxer, as do layered guitar parts and pulsating riffs. Every song seems to have layers of sound, whether they be the faster ones or the slower ones. To be clear, I'm not describing some kind of radical reinvention here. It's abundantly clear that this is the same band that made their eponymous first record five years earlier, and some of their songs have always pretty much sounded like this.
The best I can describe the change I’m seeing here is by
throwing on sub-genre labels. I realize that I'm constantly throwing out
subgenre categories like they mean something, and then constantly apologizing
for relying so heavily on subgenre categories.
Hey, they are a convenient way to sort out combinations of sounds, and
I'm going to try to explain this one more time.
Apologies for retreading previous ground, but it’s what’s on my mind.
I may not be using the term "indie rock" according to its generally accepted meaning, but irrespective of whether or not a band is on a small independent label, there are two main sounds that scream "indie" to me. One is the deliberately lo-fi sound with lots of fuzzed guitars, which doesn't really apply here. But the other is when you have repetitive patterns of guitars and often either pianos or synths with the effect of creating a pulsating pattern underlying a vocal melody that usually stays within one octave or so, focuses more on harmony than melody, and fades into the musical soundscape. Speeds of songs may vary but most commonly they're mid-tempo. Production may be described as lush or smooth. That's “indie rock” to me. In previous posts I've described National songs in this vein as "vibes" songs. Anyway, as evidenced by the “vibes” rambling that I’ve already done when talking about the Sad Songs album, the National always seemed closer to indie rock than to anything else. But there was a time when other possibly invented combinations of genres that people may have wanted to assign to them - "Americana," "folk rock," "roots rock," "alt-country," etc may have kinda fit, back when some of their songs were more stripped down and featured fewer instruments. Those don't apply anymore. Boxer is indie rock through and through.
No genre is all one quality.
Every style of music exists because people like it. Having said that* as I’ve mentioned before, I
don't much care for indie rock. In my mind it's been responsible for some
of the most boring stuff that's ever been marketed as rock and roll music, a
style allegedly defined by energy and passion.
There's a tribe of music critics and an associated scene who used to
appreciate what I'd consider actual rock (think Pearl Jam or Foo Fighters) and
even used to dip a toe or two into metal, who all sometime around 2005 started
listening exclusively to this dreary tuneless overproduced indie rock as though
it were the natural successor to regular rock, and would only listen to
something loud anymore if it was the rough lo-fi stuff. I just do not get
it. I could call out a bunch of artists that I just don't get, but that's
not really the point of this post.
So, given that Americana, roots music, alt-country, etc are, in my opinion, inherently better types of music than indie rock, how do I feel about the National's gradual slide into embracing the indie rock aesthetic? I'm here for it! Why? Quite simply, it's what they're good at. A record like Boxer plays to their strengths as a band, which include a couple of Dessners who can weave an interesting riff that feels slightly off kilter, a rhythm section that can help give a riff like that the gravitas to carry a song, and a singer who can insert whatever it is he's going on about into the soundscape. If one needs supporting data, well, we have a test case right here. "Slow Show" is built on parts of "29 Years," a misfire of a track from The National, but is basically unrecognizable as the same song. That’s because "Slow Show" sounds like a decent National indie rock song while "29 Years" sounded like a failed experiment. I think what you hear on Boxer more or less encompasses both of the two types of songs (the offbeat rockers and the sad ballads) I identified as the band's strengths last time around. So, all good.
Having said that*, not my favorite style of music. I have to admit to being slightly sad that at
least at this point in the project, I'm doubting that the National will ever
write me another “Murder Me Rachael." Can't please everyone.
Boxer ends up sounding like a pleasant blur on first listen. Good sounding record, but not many of the individual songs stood out to me. Again, this is just a first listen, so take that for exactly what it is. I'm not going to assign runners-up or worst yet, but I can say that for the moment I think "Ada" is the best song here. Subject to change, of course.
Other notes:
- I'd heard that Karin basically becomes an unofficial band
member at this point with a hand in the lyrics, so I wondered if we might move
on from pretentious bullshit word salad. No sign of said movement
here. Picking apart the credits, she's officially a co-writer of just three
songs here.
- After giving Bryan a hard time for over-drumming the soft songs on the last record, he fits in well here on a song like "Squalor Victoria," which has a rapid-fire loud drum beat that doesn't clash with the slow melody at all. I listened hard to try to figure out if they were using a drum machine, since the drums just feel like part of the soundscape, but I think I was hearing enough telltale off-beat moments to convince me that this isn't the work of computers, but rather the sort of sounds you get from a band that's very comfortable playing together.
- Speaking of indie-rockers who make fundamentally uninteresting
music, hipster darling Sufjan Stevens plays on a few of the later tracks.
(2007 was a peak era for people refusing to shut the fuck up about Sufjan
Stevens.)
- I'm decidedly not out looking for astronauts.
Thoughts on listen #2 whenever I get around to it!...
……..
*credit to Larry David for having honed in on the phrase “having said that” as a way to negate everything you yourself just said. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5DCns_n9_M
Comments
Post a Comment