The National – Sleep Well Beast review: Not quite National treasures

By Richard Godwin8 September 2017

The National have steadily risen to be the essential guitar band of the 21st century, special like R E M, smart like Radiohead, pre-eminent chroniclers of the unmagnificent lives of adults.

Their seventh album finds frontman Matt Berninger still contemplating marriage (“You said we’re not so tied together/What did you mean?”) and no less adept at arranging proper nouns and oblique imagery into melancholy configurations.

“I’m walking around like I was the one who found dead John Cheeve /In the house of love,” he purrs on the stand-out waltz, Carin in the Liquor Store (Carin being his wife and co-writer, Carin Besser).

Still, even allowing for the slo-mo effects of the National’s patented balm, this doesn’t quite cure as of old.

The Cincinnati quintet are now scattered from Los Angeles to Copenhagen and sound like five men pulling in different directions.

Guitarist Bryce Dessner was absent for many sessions, and apparently it’s he who usually mediates between his brother Aaron’s orchestral tendencies and Berninger’s desire for directness.

Sparse electronic numbers like I’ll Still Destroy You and Walk It Back feel underdeveloped; when the guitars come out on Day I Die and Turtleneck, we’re back to the leaden dynamics of their pre-Alligator albums.

But there’s still a stately autumnal magic afoot and their four-night stand in Hammersmith later this month will mark a deserved triumph.

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