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Concert review: An attempt to describe The National
The National owned the entire show except for the last song. As the band gathered center stage for a stripped-down rendition of “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks,” the audience gave a most heartfelt performance.
I do not know what this song is about. I don’t think “Vanderlyle” is even a real word. But every time front man Matt Berninger sings the lines “cry baby, cry,” I almost always do.
Lights down for 'Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks.'
FebFest Pt. 2
“Like Leonard Cohen or maybe Nick Cave, but funnier and maybe angrier. Some call it ‘dad rock’—my dad likes them,” were some of the unfitting descriptions I gave of the Brooklyn-based The National’s music to someone who was wondering what the social media hype was all about days before the concert.
It made me feel pretentious. I could have just said that The National are a good rock band, but that sounded insufficient and unjust.
When you’re talking about one of the most important bands in your long list of music obsessions, it’s not easy to give a precise explanation.
Dressed in a three-piece suit, vocalist Matt Berninger walked on stage with Aaron Dessner (guitar, keyboard), Bryce Dessner (guitar), Bryan Devendorf (drums), and Logan Cole (who was filling in for original bassist Scott Devendorf, Bryan’s brother, who just had a baby). They started off with “Don’t Swallow the Cap,” a song off their latest album “Trouble Will Find Me.”
Berninger looked sharp, as he always does. Seeing him perform live is like watching a National song come to life. With a bottle of wine in one hand and a microphone in the other, he exudes some kind of fragile and wretched vibe not unlike most National songs.
“Like Leonard Cohen or maybe Nick Cave, but funnier and maybe angrier. Some call it ‘dad rock’—my dad likes them,” were some of the unfitting descriptions I gave of the Brooklyn-based The National’s music to someone who was wondering what the social media hype was all about days before the concert.
It made me feel pretentious. I could have just said that The National are a good rock band, but that sounded insufficient and unjust.
When you’re talking about one of the most important bands in your long list of music obsessions, it’s not easy to give a precise explanation.
Dressed in a three-piece suit, vocalist Matt Berninger walked on stage with Aaron Dessner (guitar, keyboard), Bryce Dessner (guitar), Bryan Devendorf (drums), and Logan Cole (who was filling in for original bassist Scott Devendorf, Bryan’s brother, who just had a baby). They started off with “Don’t Swallow the Cap,” a song off their latest album “Trouble Will Find Me.”
Berninger looked sharp, as he always does. Seeing him perform live is like watching a National song come to life. With a bottle of wine in one hand and a microphone in the other, he exudes some kind of fragile and wretched vibe not unlike most National songs.
'All The Wine' for Matt Berninger
Berninger’s Tales
Berninger knows how to tell stories. To me, his songs are placed where pleasure and pain coexist. Simultaneously proud and helpless, they constantly explore the tension between hope and melancholy. In “I Need My Girl,” a song that highlights the Dessner twins’ intricate and floaty guitar licks, he sings: “Remember when you lost your shit and drove the car into the garden/You got out and said I’m sorry/To the vines and no one saw it?/I need my girl.” Crazy love and yearning never sounded so beautiful.
This is not to say that the band only makes the moping music that most of us sad-bastard music fans can’t get enough of. Most of their music videos show how they’re so much fun—just watch them skylark and get drunk in suits in “Graceless” and see them perform with a young boy tirelessly shredding an air guitar in “Sea of Love.” There is also the video for “Conversation 16,” where they perform with John Slattery ("Mad Men"), Kristen Schaal ("Flight of the Conchords") and a live turkey.
Aside from Berninger’s arresting baritone, one of the parts of the show that I enjoyed the most was the horn section, which was beautifully highlighted in “Fake Empire” and “Slow Show.” Also noteworthy is Devendorf’s steady and compelling drumming in the “Squalor Victoria.” All these songs are from the brilliant—and to me, the band’s best album yet— “Boxer.”
They did not play the “High Violet” favorite “Sorrow,” but perhaps this is understandable. In May last year, the band performed this song repeatedly for six hours straight at MoMA’s PS1 in New York City, an art installation collaboration with Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson.
Berninger knows how to tell stories. To me, his songs are placed where pleasure and pain coexist. Simultaneously proud and helpless, they constantly explore the tension between hope and melancholy. In “I Need My Girl,” a song that highlights the Dessner twins’ intricate and floaty guitar licks, he sings: “Remember when you lost your shit and drove the car into the garden/You got out and said I’m sorry/To the vines and no one saw it?/I need my girl.” Crazy love and yearning never sounded so beautiful.
This is not to say that the band only makes the moping music that most of us sad-bastard music fans can’t get enough of. Most of their music videos show how they’re so much fun—just watch them skylark and get drunk in suits in “Graceless” and see them perform with a young boy tirelessly shredding an air guitar in “Sea of Love.” There is also the video for “Conversation 16,” where they perform with John Slattery ("Mad Men"), Kristen Schaal ("Flight of the Conchords") and a live turkey.
Aside from Berninger’s arresting baritone, one of the parts of the show that I enjoyed the most was the horn section, which was beautifully highlighted in “Fake Empire” and “Slow Show.” Also noteworthy is Devendorf’s steady and compelling drumming in the “Squalor Victoria.” All these songs are from the brilliant—and to me, the band’s best album yet— “Boxer.”
They did not play the “High Violet” favorite “Sorrow,” but perhaps this is understandable. In May last year, the band performed this song repeatedly for six hours straight at MoMA’s PS1 in New York City, an art installation collaboration with Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson.
Matt Berninger
Terrible Love
Those who have seen the band live before, or those who have followed their recent performances probably already had an idea which songs would cap the show. First, it was the “Mr November”—the only song played off the band’s 2005 album “Alligator.”
Following this was “Terrible Love,” where the audience sang along with the scathing: “It takes an ocean not to break/It takes an ocean not to break.” By this time, the three grown men in front of me were literally bro-hugging each other as if they were scared that somebody would pull them apart.
Some of the first things I saw after the white lights indicated that the show was over was a girl wiping her tears, people hugging, and a man summarizing his night with nothing but Filipino expletives. This second half of FebFest—kicked off by American duo Buke and Gase, and Youth Lagoon aka Trevor Powers, both of which are new great discoveries for me—was exactly what I’d hoped it would be.
It is like lying on your back on water, at night, the point where your ears are already immersed and everything sounds beautiful. It’s like sinking or drowning without having to die and getting out of the water more alive than when you got in. If anyone asks me again to define this band’s music, maybe I will tell them this.
I do not like capitalizing abstract nouns, but let this be an exception. The National is Love—the good and the bad, the clean and all the mad and dirty corners of it. The overwhelming majority of fans who were at the show damn sure know this, and I hope more people (including the guy to whom I threw the Leonard Cohen comparison) would discover it, too. — BM, GMA News
The National performed at Febfest 2014 on Feb. 20 in Pasig City.
Those who have seen the band live before, or those who have followed their recent performances probably already had an idea which songs would cap the show. First, it was the “Mr November”—the only song played off the band’s 2005 album “Alligator.”
Following this was “Terrible Love,” where the audience sang along with the scathing: “It takes an ocean not to break/It takes an ocean not to break.” By this time, the three grown men in front of me were literally bro-hugging each other as if they were scared that somebody would pull them apart.
Some of the first things I saw after the white lights indicated that the show was over was a girl wiping her tears, people hugging, and a man summarizing his night with nothing but Filipino expletives. This second half of FebFest—kicked off by American duo Buke and Gase, and Youth Lagoon aka Trevor Powers, both of which are new great discoveries for me—was exactly what I’d hoped it would be.
It is like lying on your back on water, at night, the point where your ears are already immersed and everything sounds beautiful. It’s like sinking or drowning without having to die and getting out of the water more alive than when you got in. If anyone asks me again to define this band’s music, maybe I will tell them this.
I do not like capitalizing abstract nouns, but let this be an exception. The National is Love—the good and the bad, the clean and all the mad and dirty corners of it. The overwhelming majority of fans who were at the show damn sure know this, and I hope more people (including the guy to whom I threw the Leonard Cohen comparison) would discover it, too. — BM, GMA News
The National performed at Febfest 2014 on Feb. 20 in Pasig City.
