'The National' obsession

 

 

For a band which is made up of 2 pairs of brothers (Dessners and the Devendorfs) and a baritone (Matt Berninger) - there is something supremely efficient about The National's sound...like old hand mafiosos who go about their Sunday vendetta without a fuss, and still manage to turn up for church.

A bitter dose of confessional alternative to drown with your coffee, The National is not for everyone. Definitely not for everyone's Ipods. 

Halfway through High Violet - their 2010 album, "Sorrow" is National at its best - casting emotion as company, and pulling it off with style. Revelling in its confusion and sad bastard lyrics about love and life, National somehow manages to make sweet music out of all of it. If not poetry and occasional sense out of all of this...

Few bands make confusion sound grand. The National do. 

For their discography: http://www.americanmary.com/sound.php

Muffled Magnificence

These are the two words that came to my mind in order to describe The National - a band that exercise such an amazing restraint in creating such elegantly structured songs and somehow dont let themselves get carried away by the song - perhaps due to Matt Berninger's distincnt and sometimes melancholic baritone and maybe because the five piece band also has 2 pairs of brothers who probably understand each other well enough to keep it together...

its a Muffled Magnificence that makes Coldplay, sound like a loud American band - its like a giant pillow smothered over a nuclear explosion ...