I saw The National last night at the
Sidney Myer Music Bowl. I’d had a couple of pints, half a bottle of Riesling
and some dumplings ordered by way of a touchscreen computer—a strange and
intimidating technological advancement for anyone who has waited tables to make
ends meet. Feeling giddy about seeing one of my favorite bands, a tad drunk and
a little concerned about what I had just digested, my mood amounted to
something slightly spastic unhinged, like an excited 8 year-old kid on the
night before his birthday party: all chatter, motion and not a lot of sense
(did you know there is a statue of a camel-sphinx near the entrance to the Bowl?).
In other words, I was adorably irritating.
A
friend of mine introduced me to The National by way of their well-known song,
‘Bloodbuzz Ohio.’ From the moment I heard Matt Berninger sing, “I was carried
to Ohio in a swarm of bees,” and wondered what sort of pain he must have
suffered to equate that transition with such perpetual stinging, I have loved
this band.
Sure, lyrically they’re sort
of grim. All their songs seem to revolve around loneliness in modern society
(where social media seems to signal that we’re never alone and, for that, we
have never been more lonely), failed relationships, awkwardness, obsession, things-not-working-out,
and, above all, need, but dammit if Berninger’s juicy (or coffee-ee?) baritone,
alongside the careful, minimal layers of the band’s instrumentation don’t
transform these matters of the aching heart into a kind of reflective (I’ll avoid
haunting) beauty. It’s as if we are only ever looking back on these states of
mind and only ever learning from them, and feeling not good but sedately
accepting about the experience. The National drags us into these complex
emotions and instead of leaving the listener exhausted there is only a sense of
exaltation, accompanied by exhalation: all your worries, captured and released
in a song, have similarly escaped with what feels like just a breath.
Plus they have excellent pop
sentimentalities and a sensational ear for hooks that match lyrics, drums and
guitar into crescendo moments. Its delicious.
I had only ever heard that
their live work is uniformly excellent, so I went to the show with fairly high
expectations. They opened with “Don’t Swallow The Cap” and as soon as Berninger
intoned, “I have only two emotions, | Careful fear and dead devotion,” then hit
his delightfully wordy and convoluted run, “I see a bright white beautiful heaven hangin'
over me,” well, I may have swooned and anxiety melted off of me. It was an
outstanding moment, a realisation of a dream that I never knew I had, but when
it revealed itself to me I wondered why I hadn’t been thinking about it all the
time.
Because I’d been
listening to The National sporadically the week before the show to orientate
myself—find again and again what I really enjoy about them to grasp onto at the
show—and I’ve been sort of trying to get back to my poetry reading for work,
I’ve been grappling with the notion of what makes a work of art ‘beautiful.’ This
is not meant in the immediate physical aesthetic sense, but, rather, in the
sensation a work can provoke in its audience. Beautiful in the sense that it is
a moment of subsumption into the work, where you are almost one with it, aware
of it, perfectly in tune to its message. Think of when you read a passage (in
any form of literature) and every word has a depth of clarity and relatedness
to your self, and, in doing so, it almost becomes you and expresses you in a
way you didn’t think you could ever be expressed, and because this is an
amazing and unexpected insight, it is beautiful. That’s what I mean.
Whenever I hear
“Bloodbuzz” or “Mistaken for Strangers” or “I Need My Girl” I can only think of
them as beautiful pieces of music.
And The National,
I think, didn’t let me down last night. They looked inside me (from a great
distance—we were tucked up towards the back of the general admin crowd, but
still…) and for nearly two hours they took hold of me and said, “we’ll handle that for a while, rest easy fella.” And,
you know what, I did. The spastic man-child who rocked up to the show and
quickly sought out more beer was soothed. The need for another can of Boags
Draught was alleviated and I bopped like a madman, with occasional hand
gestures and foot movements to indicate ‘dancing.’
Objectively, they
may have taken a little while to warm up—the end of their set seemed more
energetic than its beginning—and the crowd was too full of deadbeats intent on
being po-faced and serious—I happily grooved a little and sung a bunch, while
they looked depressed—but that slight criticism aside, they were everything I
hoped they were going to be and, more importantly, were everything I needed
them to be. They played it best, “All the very best of us | String ourselves up
for love,” and the crowd, strung up on their own love for the band, sang along.
This may all be
getting a bit sappy, a touch sentimental, and awfully fanboy-ish (unashamedly,
truly), and I’ll read this back and look at myself and mutter, “jeez Dave, get
off much?” but fuck it the show mattered and they pulled off an amazing set in
a massive outdoor setting (which I also think is overrated) by absolutely
covering the night atmosphere in the eerie complexity and subtly forceful
percussion of their music. Everything was straight-up guitars, driving drums
and Berninger’s voice meeting them note for note and rising above them, making
sense of it all.
