Eric's Music Ramblings and Indie Musings: The National - High Violet

The National - High Violet

Go to spectrumculture.com and take the reast of the top 20 list.The National reportedly intended to get an optimistic, catchy record as their follow-up to Boxer. Instead, this year's High Violet was every bit as black as its predecessor. It also ended up every bit as good; indeed, one is hard-pressed to place the album's premier song because nearly all of them are just that damn great.

The record arrived with much anticipation and eventually garnered the case of mainstream attention that snags a pair of indie acts each year, yet somehow the band managed to exceed these lofty expectations. We might end up looking backward at 2010 as the class we began to make it for granted that every new National album would be as singular as the one that came right before it.Everything about High Violet - from Matt Berninger's suffering-voiced baritone to the band's carefully crafted arrangements - reveals a solemnity and sincerity that would make lesser bands sound completely overblown. Moments of dark humor notwithstanding, the album is exceptionally and plainly sad, whether it's in the distance felt in songs like "Sorrow" and "London," in images such as "Manhattan valleys of the short" or in mysterious, ambiguous lyrics like "it takes an ocean not to break." There are few comforts throughout - maybe a little consolation can be ground in the amenities of category and on the hints of idolatry in closer "Vanderlye Crybaby Geeks" - but Berninger's lyrics mostly centre around mental and personal issues exacerbated by lousy trips back home and a deficiency of drugs to "class it out."The album might not receive highest position on many year-end best-of lists - that honor seems probable to go to a handful of righteously seething New Jersey rockers, a certain Canadian band with a bent for grandiose statements about The State of Man or an ego-centric rapper who lived up to his self-generated hype - but High Violet, like most of the National's output, might age better than any of them. It takes no little number of sand and science to give an album so disarmingly honest; the Interior have enough of both, delivering yet another album whose timelessness already seems assured.