High Violet

A long piece from the vault, considering my mixed feelings about that National's High Violet, from 2010:

High Violet – The National (4AD)
Boxer was just about my favorite album of the last ten years, for a number of reasons, some (perhaps all?) of them contextual to my life at the time the album came out.

So part of the problem with High Violet inheres in the necessary comparison with what came before it. The National have set the bar very high. Further, Boxer also took some getting used to. It didn’t immediately strike me as the best album of the last ten years. On first hearing, it seemed like a decent and pretty interesting piece of work, but the songs weren’t instantly addictive, which is often the sign of an enduring pleasure. If you don’t understand it the first five times you play it, but you want to keep playing it because there’s something going on that’s getting under your skin, that can be an indication of future obsession. Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom did something similar a long time ago, as I recall. Boxer did that - got under my skin and stayed there for two years or more.

Also, it came out right at the same time my now-wife and I were planning our wedding. Something about the massively romantic and bohemian milieu suggested by the songs (and by those tantalizing Vincent Moon shorts , which eventually became A Skin A Night, and which teased the future greatness of the whole album), made me want to throw out all my crappy clothes, buy a single (expensive) black suit, and handful of white shirts, and live out the National lifestyle, in the south of France, with a select number of close friends, an endless amount of fine wine, and an acceptable degree of self-conscious melancholy/ennui. You know, like a hipster (preferably a hipster with a trust fund, to be able to afford that suit and all that wine, which, by the way, would not be all for me, but would be shared with my select coterie – I aspire to be a collectivist hipster, after all). In short, Boxer suggested an aspirational, if alienated, community, of like-minded, disaffected cool grown-ups, who like nice icy drinks, and who suffer together (perhaps in exile), generously, lovingly, elegantly, through the indignities of the Patriot Act and its accompanying humiliations and embarrassments. Darling, can you tie my string?

But I think that the greatness of Boxer is not the only issue I’m having with High Violet. While the new album is intriguing and has been in the rotation pretty much incessantly since I got it a couple of weeks ago (perhaps because I’m trying to like it, and hoping that it opens up in the same lovely ways that Boxer did - I've played it three times all the way through while trying to write this), there’s something about it that’s bothering me, and I’ve been struggling to put my finger on what that something might be. Perhaps it’s more than one thing, actually.

To start with, I continue to dislike the opening song, “Terrible Love,” fairly strongly, and not just because it isn’t “Fake Empire,” which is one of the most brilliant and difficult album openers of my music-listening lifetime. The first twenty times I heard “Fake Empire,” I didn’t understand it at all, at least rhythmically; the way the drums and the piano just don’t seem to go together; the way the time signature seems to change at some point from one incomprehensible beat to another equally incomprehensible one. Those lyrics, though, how transporting they were:

“Stay up super late tonight,
Picking apples, making pie,
Put a little something in our lemonade
And take it with us.
We’re half-awake in a fake empire.”

These lyrics conjured a delicious world which combined domesticity, the demi-monde, and realpolitik in one dense stanza. This was the perfect hipster milieu, almost harking back to Karl Marx’s utopian scenario, “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.” In the National’s Bohemia, we’ll pick apples in the morning, bake apples in the afternoon, make hard lemonade in the evening, and go out to the barricades after dinner (bringing our drinks with us, of course), half-awake in our fake empire. This may not be what Matt Berninger had in mind but, intentional fallacy be damned, for me this epitomized the apotheosis of my own hipster aspirations - a book of verse, a flask of wine, thee beside me, and Paradise is near enow, as Omar Khayyam had it in a slightly different configuration of the well-rounded life suggested by Marx.

“Terrible Love,” on the other hand, just seems leaden by comparison, from the muddy mix, to the plain awkwardness of the lyric:

“It’s a terrible love and I’m walking with spiders.”

Apart from the fact that I don’t have a clue what that means (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing – God knows, that’s part of an infinite list), the accompanying music suggests a couple of things that are honestly slightly upsetting. To start with, the break halfway through the song, where a chorus of “It takes an ocean not to break” punctuates the anxiety, suggests, for me, irresistibly (wait for it), “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie, an unfortunately (mis)heard influence which is swiftly followed by another resonance in the lick that comes just a little later as the song is spiraling to its outro, this time to, believe it or not, XTC’s “Making Plans for Nigel.” I may be the only one who hears these echoes, but that’s the terrible, spidery love that I can’t escape when “Terrible Love” plays, and it bothers me a LOT, honestly.

But that inauspicious opening also suggests a bigger problem with the album, which is mostly about the lyrics. While the massive National engine roars impressively throughout (notably on “Bloodbuzz Ohio” and “Lemonworld”), the lyrical focus on High Violet appears to be on Matt Berninger’s self-pity ("I don't want to get over you"? Really, Matt? Really? Come on, you can do better than that), rather than the expression of a wider collective alienation which seemed to characterize Boxer so majestically. While there are magnificent exceptions to this, either because Berninger’s focus broadens at some points, or because his solipsism occasionally finds its mark (“Conversation 16” is fantastically weird, and represents a wonderful leap from the vaguely bohemian-political mise-en-scene of “Fake Empire” to the surreal Zombie scenario of “I was afraid I’d eat your brains, ‘cause I’m evil” – now that’s what I’m talking about, Berninger. Do more of THAT), there’s a remarkable amount of lame, first-person, poor-me stuff here ("Sorrow" and "Anyone's Ghost," for example) , which is kind of disappointing, especially given the formidable and seamless front presented by the instrumentation here, which often seems to be wasted in the service of some frankly mediocre lyrical offerings. “Bloodbuzz Ohio” brings things together in a relatively rare coherence, albeit that Matt “never married” and Ohio doesn’t remember him. The drumming, though (Oh my God, the drumming) recalls the most magnificent and sorely missed high points of Echo and the Bunnymen from Heaven Up Here and elsewhere.

The nadir of this indulgence appears, at least for now, to be “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks,” whose title not only suggests the worst excesses of language poetry, but whose music fails to rescue said lyrical slackness. It’s just plain unfortunate, honestly, and as poor a way to end an album as “Terrible Love” was a poor way to begin it. I can’t even bring myself to listen to it anymore; for me, the album ends either with “England,” a fine, if perhaps-not-classic National outing, or “Walk Away,” a bonus track filched from iTunes. VCG is dead to me, ‘cause I’m evil.

Now, having said all of that, there are a couple of silver (city) linings which may help me (and of course, speaking of solipsism, this is always all about my feelings) get to a better place from my current perch of disappointment. First, as I said, the music is mostly impeccable, and sometimes terrifyingly so. If Berninger doesn’t get his lyric-writing act together, the twin twins could easily carry on as an instrumental band recording soundtracks for a Tarantino Zombie Trilogy. Second, there is a distinct possibility that I’ll get over it (even though I don't want to - I crack myself up) and the whole album will cohere into a beautiful whole, where the lyrics accrue greater and more generous significance over time (although I’d be shocked if “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” was salvageable at this point, recalling as it does something truly horrible like REM’s “Everybody Hurts”).

But mostly, I think that this album should perhaps have waited for five deserving companions to accompany the five genuinely/potentially great songs here (the suite that includes “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” “Lemonworld,” perhaps “Runaway,” definitely “Conversation 16” and “England” - OK, maybe that should be six; "Afraid of Anyone" is definitely growing on me, mostly because of the incredible and relentless drumming onslaught at the end of the song). Failing that, perhaps they should just have released an EP (if they’d asked me for my input, I would have suggested calling it “Zombies”), which would have been feted for its hermetically sealed brilliance, and then they could have continued to live the boho touring life, and continued to search for the next five great National songs for the second EP in the series (“Zombies II”). I’ll explain everything to the A&R suits.