THE NATIONAL - Boxer (2007), listens #3-4+

What’s the anatomy of a song that really gets me excited?  That’s the sort of question that it’s a challenge to answer given that I’m trying to talking about music through a non-musical medium.  But I’ll make an attempt to use my words to explain why “Mistaken For Strangers” is so great.  The open chord that forms the main riff is the first thing you hear, and it’s both driving with that nervous tension I like in National songs (especially after Bryan comes in) and hauntingly dissonant.  They keep hammering that riff for awhile because they know how good it is.  Matt’s run-on-sentence delivery is perfect for the verses leading into the record’s best hook on the chorus.  I want to sing along but also feel dread about the premise of being filled with quarters, whatever that means, or being mistaken for strangers.  Lyrics throughout the track have a splash of the usual bullshit word salad, but they also convey a few images that speak to me.  For reasons beyond the scope of this blog, the particular path I’ve taken in my life leads me to, maybe a little atypically, have felt the fears that “Mistaken For Strangers” seems to be about more acutely over the past ten years or so.  I tend to dance around the meanings of Matt’s lyrics rather than dissect them, because that’s how it makes the most sense to me to approach the “collage of images” school of songwriting.  Suffice to say, the song speaks to me today in a way that it wouldn’t have while I was in my twenties.  Anyway, then the second part of the chorus totally matches the cadence of the verses, nervously rocking in a way that makes the whole song cohesive.  That’s where we deliver the knockout blow – “you wouldn’t want an angel watching over you… surprise, surprise, they wouldn’t want to watch.”  Ouch.  The song is punchy, and within less than three and a half minutes we’re into that nice little keyboard outro and I have the chorus stuck in my head and want to listen again rather than move on to the next song.  Brilliant stuff.

I knew this was a killer track, but it’s only today that I concluded that it is, in fact, my new favorite National song that I’ve heard to date.  I’m wondering if the National are destined to be a band like Vampire Weekend who just have those one or two really amazing songs per record that are too good to ever write of the band as “not really for me,” even when tempted to say so based on the other stuff.

So, yeah, about the other stuff.  I think we’ve established that Boxer is a good record.  It is quite good.  At moments it’s transcendent, whereas at other moments it’s the kind of “good” that I appreciate rather than loving.  I do think at some point all I can say is “comes down to taste” – I’m just wired to get way more excited, by, say, Everything Remains (As It Never Was) by Swiss melodic death metal/folk metal collective Eluveitie* than I am about anything by the National.  On one level I’m slightly disappointed that the other songs didn’t grow on me to the point where I unabashedly love them.  But taste is gonna do what it does, even when something is “objectively” (ha ha) clearly good.  I’d rather focus on the positives.  The band sound tight here, solid musicianship and synergy between members across the board, and the back half of the record is just a solid run of good stuff for awhile in a way that few records from anyone achieve.  (Is part of their thing back-loading the record so that more of the good stuff is towards the end?)  As far as the big growers, I hadn’t really pegged “Start A War” as the track that would rise the most in my estimation between second listen and now, but here we are.  “Start A War” isn’t just a mournful song, it’s a tightly composed song that immediately manages to make me feel sad in the intended way. 

As tedious as bullet points can be, it's the best way to separate "the main/important points of a blog post" from "a few random observations that didn't fit anywhere else."  So...

- My own imaginary narrative about the beginning of the record is that Bryan was bothered by how late he made his presence felt on “Fake Empire,” immediately jumped in to get a loud drum part going on “Mistaken For Strangers” saying “look, this will be a rock song,” tried to do the same thing to keep “Brainy” from being so mid, but this time he failed, forcing him and the rest of the band to reach a détente around the time of “Squalor Victoria” such that they’d write stuff that meshed well with him going nuts on the drums if he allowed them to mostly not rock.

- I don’t know if there’s supposed to be an actual narrative thread running through Boxer.  I haven’t heard anything about it being a concept album or anything, but I briefly wonder.  “Start A War” sounds musically like the comedown from “Apartment Story,” and then the latter and the following “Racing Like A Pro” both go out of their way to build key phrases around the word “ruffian.”  That’s not something you do two songs in a row by accident.  I can kinda sorta imagine that the couple from “Apartment Story” run out of steam and become the couple from “Guest Room,” and maybe over more time their relationship cools until they become the characters from “Ada.”  Maybe.

- I did listen a few times to “Blank Slate” and “Santa Clara,” the B-sides from the “Mistaken For Strangers” single, mostly because the former starts out as more of a rocker than most of the record.  I understand why these were the ones that didn’t make the record.  I don’t know if they’re unfinished or merely lesser efforts all around.

- Speaking of unfinished, I did go back to listen to “29 Years” from The National (the debut record) just to remind myself how it used to sound and what got reused and… woof.  I’d forgotten just how horribly misconceived the whole track was.  Let’s just say that the line between “indie and lo-fi” and “amateurish and bad” is not blurred in the slightest by “29 Years.”  The thing is that the few lyrics that survived to form the core of “Slow Show” aren’t even anything special, and nothing else about the rewrite has anything to do with the original song.  “Slow Show” is pretty far from my favorite National song, but at least it’s a song with a clear structure and point.  I just don’t really see what it was about the conceit of waiting to meet someone for twenty-nine years that Matt et al found so compelling that they thought it needed a second go at all.


- Favorite track:  “Mistaken For Strangers” (no surprise)
- Runner up: “Ada” (no change)
- Least favorite track:  “Brainy”
- Rating:  4/5

Definitive running list of records by the National that I have listened to in order of what I have decided is unambiguously their quality
1)  Boxer
2)  Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers
3)  Alligator
4)  The National
5)  Cherry Tree

Thoughts on High Violet whenever I get around to it!


*I like to imagine that the excitement poured out of that particular blog post in a way that would be immediately obvious to the reader, if I had one, and contrast with just about everything else I post here.  Hopefully someone who reads that post becomes convinced that they should try Everything Remains (As It Never Was).  It’s incredible… if, and perhaps only if, you like that sort of thing.