The National: Trouble Will Find Me — Review
In this post, we bring you the second instalment in our week’s worth of reviews. For this article, Alex Sheriff takes a look at The National’s Trouble Will Find Me.
You might draw some anticipatory thoughts about The National’s 2013 release, their sixth studio album, just from that title right there: Trouble Will Find Me. And we’ve probably all experienced those shit-out-of-luck moments where it feels as though Life really does have it in for us, as though some (other)worldly forces are conspiring against our contentment. This kind of sentiment: the kind that arises from our modern-day woes and is underscored by a sort of existential dread, runs relentlessly through The National’s discography, from start to finish. But this album, despite possessing an unavoidable sense of melancholia within its poetic lyrics and listless vocal delivery (courtesy of lead vocalist Matt Berninger), is elegantly life-affirming. After listening, we might not entirely have learned “to appreciate the void” as it says in the album’s first track, ‘I Should Live in Salt’, but we might entertain the possibility more than we did to begin with.
This first track sees Berninger explore, with some guilt and regret (“I should live in salt for leaving you behind”), a rift in his relationship with his brother. With a time signature as fractious as the relationship was fractured, it’s hard not to be struck by the remarkable poignancy of this song; and this is just the opener on an album that fails to falter in its neurotic and self-referential lyricism. By the second track, ‘Demons’, Berninger confesses, “I am secretly in love with / Everyone that I grew up with”. This line, just one of the eminently memorable lyrics from the album, conveys a pathetic, yet darkly humorous sense of the inescapability of the past. Our past becomes a part of our present whether we like it or not. In owing so much of who we become to our past, who could blame us for being even a little wrapped up, if not in love, with those we inevitably take with us?
Propelled by intricate drum rhythms and an instrumental backing that intimates an approaching crescendo that never quite comes, the only shadow of hope in this second song seems to come from the final verse. Yet even here, Berninger seems to lament, half-earnestly and half-humorously: “When I walk into the room / I do not light it up”, before the verse draws bathetically to a close with a mere “Fuck” and the chorus returns.
‘Don’t Swallow the Cap’ follows from this, continuing with the forceful drums that preceded, but accompanied now by repetitive piano chords and drawn-out strings. A tension hangs in the background as Berninger’s vocals rise out of the sound in their unmistakable monotone. Here the vocalist is rendered as a man reduced to his core: “I have only two emotions / Careful fear and dead devotion”, as he concedes that even with just these two emotions to spare he still “can’t get the balance right”. This song, however, does strike a balance and harmoniously aligns its vibrant, complex composition with the sombre loneliness of its lyrics.
It is not until just over halfway through the album that the tension found in the first half feels even close to being abated. The eighth track arrives just in time, though, and ‘Graceless’ offers a powerful moment of catharsis. Here Berninger’s lyrics deal with self-destruction, a man about to “Come apart at the seams” at the realisation of his own irremediable gracelessness. The musical arrangement running alongside these lyrics feels just as ready to descend into chaos as Berninger, but it is held together seamlessly; it gives the illusion of chaos.
This track showcases some of Berninger’s most evocative and elegiac lyrics too. “God loves everybody, don’t remind me” he sings, in the pre-chorus, before: “I took the medicine, and I went missing”. Here is a speaker left faithless and hopeless, a speaker whose only escape is in self-destruction. Only when he loses his true self and is “dead in the mind”, numbed to his core, will he be able to (“brighten the place”) even come close to a semblance of contentment. As the chaos collapses we are left with one word: “Grace”, and cannot help but feel as though this track is delivered with just that.
The careful cultivation of this album is evident wherever you choose to look; even in the arrangement of the tracks does the meticulousness seems self-evident. The final few songs of the album draw a close more sedately, at times seemingly languishing in the aftermath of the relinquished tension. The meticulousness does not slip though.
This is clear with even the most fleeting listen to “I Need My Girl”. It may be that this is one of the simpler songs on the album in terms of meaning, with Berninger discussing it as a song ‘about missing my [his] wife and daughter’, but this is where the simplicity ends. Masterfully produced, this track echoes as though played to an empty room. If you missed the latent loneliness in the lyrics, you now won’t be getting away until you’ve felt it as viscerally as if it were your own. The trailing sound at the end then leads seamlessly into the next track, “Humiliation”, where the sound of drums greets us and begins to grow. Dreamy guitar riffs and droning choruses make for an ethereal listen. This song sounds blurred around the edges like the “tunnel-vision” the lyrics reference.
The National’s music is often described as the kind you might need to dedicate a little more attention to — a ‘slow-burn’ — and the listener prepared to listen again will always be rewarded the most. Perhaps that makes this review, coming in almost 5 years after the release of Trouble Will Find Me, just on time. But I think this album shows that there might not be so much to that description. This is fifty-five minutes of poignant, evocative, darkly poetic lyricism, underpinned by intricate, multi-layered musical arrangements. There is much to be compelled by here, and that is why it is not only one of my favourite albums, but also my pick for this week’s series of articles.
Article and URY Music Editor: Alex Sheriff
