My first installments for Music by Mood centered around catharsis, which Nine Inch Nails and My Chemical Romance both perfectly embody. Sometimes, though, the act of simply purging yourself of dark feelings doesn’t cut it, because doing so can often eschew taking responsibility for your own role in your troubles. That’s where regret comes in, and that is the emotion embodied in most albums by The National.
Their sixth and possibly greatest album, Trouble Will Find Me, is a tonal masterpiece, a cohesive, sustained musical document of the feeling that Martin Scorsese once referred to as “exquisite romantic pain.” They have been building to this for the 12-plus years they’ve been a band.
Trouble Will Find Me is intriguing in that its sound is both familiar and somewhat new. National fans will likely embrace it for having the same anthemic intensity and melancholy as albums like High Violet and Alligator. There are no real rockers in the vein of “Mr. November” and “Terrible Love” here except for “Sea of Love” and most of “Graceless,” but the album never loses momentum at any point the way some National albums do (the end of Boxer, for example). The newness comes in the increased presence of dark, wry humor and the thorough consistency of the music.
Not a single note is wasted or tossed off here. Every musical and lyrical decision is confident and assured. Some might mistake this for The National having developed a sense of complacency in their musical aesthetic, but, in fact, they’ve created their own sound.
In the past, I often summarized The National as Joy Division crossed with Bruce Springsteen plus a dash of Arcade Fire. This album and High Violet both sound like they couldn’t have come from any other band. The combination of Aaron and Bryce Dessner’s guitars – which can switch on a dime between plaintive picking and ferocious riffing – and the relentless bass and drums (respectively) of Scott and Bryan Devendorf, accented by piano, string and brass flourishes, creates a fever pitch of tension and dread. It often explodes in final choruses or climaxes that are well-known for creating excellent sing-along moments at their highly regarded live shows (which I’ve yet to experience myself, smdh).
Although lead singer and lyricist Matt Berninger is married with children and ostensibly happy to be so, you wouldn’t know it from the lyrics on Trouble Will Find Me. The feelings on display here are almost invariably expressions of loneliness, regret, self-hatred, insecurity and deep depression.
The first track, “I Should Live in Salt,” makes this clear immediately with the lyric that supplies the song’s title – “I should live in salt for leaving you behind.” For me, at least, that evokes the biblical parable of Lot’s wife, bound in salt for looking back at the burning city of Sodom. Imagine that for a moment, the tactile sensation of it. Salt pressing harsh into your skin until it’s raw and bleeding, constricting your movements. Imagine feeling so sorry for something that you beg for such a feeling. Most people have, for one reason or another. Most of us are also lucky enough to cope with it.
The pain of this album is most pronounced in the songs “Demons,” “This is the Last Time,” “Graceless,” “I Need My Girl,” “Humiliation” and “Pink Rabbits.” It takes different forms throughout. “Demons” is about having no specific reason in your life to fall prey to black moods but doing so anyway, with the narrator simultaneously begging for sympathy (“Can I stay here, I can sleep on the floor?”) and being resigned to pain (“All my drowning friends can see, now there is no running from it”).
“This is the Last Time,” “Graceless” and “Slipped” approach these expressions of regret a little differently, as they are somewhat colored by frustration with another person. Maybe it’s a friend you fell out with, a lover who slighted you or a family member who never understood you. There’s more than a twinge of defiance in “Last Time” and “Slipped.” “Graceless” is, to my mind, calling the “you” in the song out for being graceless, as much as it’s indicting its own narrator. Those clashing feelings are also universal. We get so wrapped up in trying to determine who’s to blame for our misery that we can easily deter ourselves from the pursuit of solutions to it.
“I Need My Girl” and “Pink Rabbits” represent the peak of the pain on Trouble Will Find Me. The former may be the most musically beautiful – the only accompaniment to Berninger’s words is some repeated, clean electric guitar picking, some feedback hum, keyboard and the occasional kick drum thump – and it just fucking kills. The lyrics are bound to be drunken, self-pitying Facebook statuses for more than a few people (or maybe just me) – “I am good and I am grounded / Davey says that I look taller, but I can’t get my head around it / I keep getting smaller and smaller.”
“Rabbits,” meanwhile, is a definite contender for best song on the album and one of The National’s periodic drunk-lament piano ballads. It’s perhaps the best representative of the newest direction the band has taken – tempering melancholy with deadpan humor. On the humor hand, you’ve got the characterization of solo drinking as “pink rabbits” and the lyric “You didn’t see me / I was fallin’ apart / I was a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park.”
Conversely, the song contains what may be the saddest lyric Berninger’s ever written: “You said it would be painless, a needle in the dark / You said it would be painless / It wasn’t that at all.” It’s not voiced as an accusation, merely a statement of what depression, a breakup or any other emotionally trying life alteration feels like when we come to terms with the realization that no, sometimes things will not fucking be okay. At least not right away.
Regretting whatever you did to bring about such things – if indeed you did somehow cause them in one way or another – isn’t an erasable feeling. But it’s also unsustainable, and that’s what this song, and The National’s music in general, both make clear.
And even that doesn’t change the fact that sometimes being cognizant of the need to cope with pain, regret and self-abnegation doesn’t, by default, allow you to do so. Trouble Will Find Me is an album that’s perfect to have by your side and in your headphones through all stages of such feelings – a rowboat through the sea of love and loss and conflict and union that comprises all human emotional relationships.
Liam Green can be reached at lgreen@thoughtpollution.com.
I like the record just fine- I’m just not very sure I’d call it anywhere near their best. It seems like it is basically a less memorable version of the last record.
High Violet had an identity in that I noticed musically they smoothed over the dynamics a bit, and as a guitarist, the combination of either heavy strumming or an intricate “twinkly” picking was traded off for mostly what sounds like a lot of thumb strumming.
What High Violet had though was some very memorable builds and pay-offs. That seems to have been dialed back a bit here more, yet the song structure/construction of the tunes is pretty unchanging from HV. Also lyrically, lines like “I was a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park” feels like the same linguistic technique as something like “I owe money, to the money, to the money I owe”. So the overall compositions seem to be a bit autopilot.
So while it is a good record for fans, especially those fond of HV, but they don’t seem to be challenging their own formula enough. Translates more like B-sides and rarities from the HV sessions to my ears.
Again, I still like it.
yeah i think that’s an interesting point about the lyrical similarity. I think The National are a bit tricky to figure out since they have their own sound, so it’s tough to tell if everything sounds the same or we’re getting really intricate variations on what they do well. I’m not sure I’ve done enough listening to the new stuff to really tell. I would also suggest Slate’s “Why I Hate The National” for further reading “http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2013/05/the_national_s_trouble_will_find_me_reviewed_too_many_crescendos.html”