Gregorian Nominee for Best Album 2007

The National - Boxer

Crawling inside the songs of The National takes some persistance. Their often-moody and nuanced character portraits can be passed over on a half listen as somewhat monotoned and hookless, devoid of that pop sugar coating that it sometimes takes to catch your ear.

But a careful listener can attest that to be grabbed into the songs of this five-member band from New York via Cincinnati is to be taken down into a subconscious world of vague suggestivity and melodic fragments where you feel an inchoate sense of yearning and alienation that's as profound as it is troubling.

The National's 2005 release Alligator mined the darkest recesses of the male mind - fleshing out it's contradictions, confusion, predatory impulses and anguished sense of purposelessness. There were many carefully subdued songs of meditative desire and despair but the most jarring and thrilling were the moments when the songs and lead singer Matt Berninger would become unhinged, belting out phrases like "my mind's not right, my mind's not right" and "I won't fuck us over, I'm Mr. November."

On their follow-up album (their fourth full album) Boxer, the band takes a deliberate and effective step inward, holding on with more restraint and focus while sublimely painting portraits of people engaged but separated by their own shortcomings or forces they don't understand or fail to control.

Most notably deliberate and sad is the carefully sung and quiet tune "Green Gloves." A stripped down and slowly shuffling acoustic guitar and an edgy but restrained electric guitar work together as Berninger quietly paints a picture of someone detached from their friends yet yearning to be with them and feel closeness when it's apparent he is all alone.

"Get inside their clothes with my green gloves, watch their videos, in their chairs," Berninger intimately sings. The song is a study in the power of subtlety both in lyrical suggestion and musical expression.

While largely bereft of the viscerally intense barrages of some of the songs on Alligator, Boxer does pick up the tempo in several of its songs. Most apparent is the vigorous "Mistaken For Strangers." Sounding somewhat reminiscent of the post-punk Joy Division sound, the track feels sharp and pointed even if it describes slipping into anonymity, anchored by Berninger's steady baritone. "Another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults," cap an explosive chorus.

The album slowly blossoms into a series of vignettes of relationships where the song's characters are either hiding out together from the vagaries of the world around them or painfully unable to make connections, rendering Berninger's characters threatening, trying to impress, or struggling to have conversation.

Toward the end of the album, The National paint a startling and staggeringly sad portrait of someone struggling with the emotional trauma of being at the whim of a mind they can't quite control. Called "Racing Like a Pro," the person Berninger describes sounds like they are imprisoned by manic depression.

"Sometimes you get up and bake a cake or something, sometimes you stay in bed, sometimes you go la di da di da di da da, til your eyes roll back into your head," he plaintively sings. The song captures the essence of The National's brilliance as it slowly builds the emotional core with carefully expanding instrumentation to the heart of the song in which Berninger repeats, "You're dumbstruck baby, now you know."

If there's something that separates The National from the current "hot" indie bands, it's songs like this that build sketches slowly, that focuses open-endedly on the hardships of adulthood in contemporary society. Their songs are harnessed by a baritone voice expressive of so many complicated human emotions and a band that knows how to use their instrumentation to grab ahold and enhance the emotional center of the songs. 

 The National - "Apartment Story" from Boxer