THE NATIONAL - High Violet (2010), listen #1
There are different ways of listening to music with various levels
of attention. Personally I can’t be
doing anything else involving reading or else it completely fails to register. Although I do listen to music in the car, I always
wonder whether I’m not doing it justice because the car speakers don’t always
capture the nuances. I do best if my
headphones are in, and try to avoid dismissing something out of hand if I haven’t
given it at least one listen with headphones.
So, walking, working out at the gym, and chores like laundry are ideal
music time. And further I’ve had enough
distractions at the gym that I really try extra hard to not pull the “this
doesn’t deserve a second listen” trigger if I’ve only heard it at the gym. Being a music nerd takes effort, man.
My first listen to High Violet was in the gym not knowing any songs going in. So of course it’s going to be an incomplete take. I’ll talk through the three main phases of listening. The first was the “engaged” part. This is when the listener is locked in to everything. So, I do recall a whole progression of initially wondering whether “Terrible Love” was going to be too inert for me, and then appreciating the way the song opened up in the end. And I recall at first not finding a hook in “Anyone’s Ghost,” and then really digging the minor chord that accompanies the chorus and the doubled vocals in general. My main impression of those first few tracks was that the National had decided to put a lot of stuff into every song. At its best, “Terrible Love” has a bunch of different musical ideas that do seem unified into one song. So I can definitely say that tracks 1-3 sound like they’ll be worth coming back to and unpacking. More generally, even if I never did come around on spending much time unpacking the lyrics, I’m definitely sold on the premise that this band’s musical compositions will generally reward repeat listens, and I have little doubt that they will here, just like they did on Sad Songs, Alligator and Boxer.*
Part two was the “in and out” part. Like most music anywhere, ever, the record did
not hold my undivided attention for its entire run length, and I drifted in and
out. I do think the songs get less
engaging after the first three, but a first listen is always going to have some
of that. I’ll go further and say that I’m
really thinking that “Afraid Of Everyone” is in fact a bit of a misfire, but as
always, opinion subject to change. Maybe
it’s placed where it is so that I’ll feel better about the fairly by the
numbers indie-rock of “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” heh.
“Lemonworld” started off sounding like absolutely my shit, then it introduced
some insufferable “doo doo doo doo” parts and got back to the narrator giving a
detailed critique of female characters, and then it did throw in both some nice
harmonies and some clever turns of phrase, so I went on a bit of a journey with
that song just over the course of one listen.
Not sure yet if I like it, and most of these.
Part three as I moved over from the free weights to the treadmill was more the “background music” phase in which I just wasn’t even trying that hard to absorb every nuance. In that phase, the record moved into some longer songs that I let play. Very brief impressions, without any specifics, are that I was disappointed that “Runaway” didn’t really grab me at all, and that I appreciated the slow-build-to-a-big-ending endings of both “Conversation 16” and “England.” I can’t be any more specific than that.
That’s where we are. The idea behind this “listen by listen” style of blogging is to be a more verbose version of the live reactions that are YouTube’s bread and butter. I always want to hear those reactors turn the camera off for a little while and really sit with the song, since I don’t expect everyone to appreciate every single brilliant musical and lyrical touch that goes into your average Rush song when they’re also performing for camera whilst literally never having heard the song before.
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