Purple Patch
The National have turned their emotive, evocative music into a raging fire to which music fans across the world have finally been beckoned. High Violet represents the apex of their achievements so far, and guitarist Bryce Dessner sheds light on the incredible efforts needed to get there.
Ordinary, daily routine can be the source of as much misery as pleasure. The best music bridges the gap between the melancholy and the joyous, making it one and the same. The best songwriters take that which spans the two and build it from their perspective on life, either at home or away. In doing so it feels like they've somehow touched upon an unanswered question, provided a glint of hope when it feels there is none. The National have patiently been doing this since 1999, garnering a steady stream of accolades and success with each subsequent album. 2005's Alligator, 2007's Boxer and now this year's High Violet have all been lauded for their spacious, elegiac triumph, and it's only now that each one is being cherished by listeners on a grander scale. “There's something in our music,” says Bryce Dessner, co-guitarist with his brother Aaron, one of two pairs of brothers that make up four fifths of the band. “Obviously you could take away almost everything and Matt could sing over a full orchestra or just a solemn piano or a crazy techno beat maybe and you'd still be like 'oh, this is The National'.”
Matt Berninger, vocalist, lyricist and the sole non-musician, is a striking figure quite apart from his sandpaper, baritone voice. He certainly has foresight to craft songs of understated emotional intelligence and gravity. “I think the challenge with the songs is that obviously he sings in a limited range. I think we often get labelled as miserablist or dark rock because his voice is dark, it's like hearing a solo cello or something. The actual timbre of the voice is sombre even if he's actually singing about happy, ridiculous stuff, which often he is actually. There's a lot of humour in the songs, but because it has a slow, gravelly kind of sound to it it does invoke, as I always say to friends and journalists, 'fucking the heartstrings a little bit'.” With that kind of centrepoint around which to revolve, the band's job is all too clear.
“With the music, we've felt, especially live it happens, our job is to make the music dynamic and create arc and flow and make the song go somewhere. We're really sensitive to that and we've written great songs for the first minute and then they don't go anywhere and it doesn't last. Usually it's worked better for us to shade stuff in subtle ways and that's maybe why people call our music 'a grower' or maybe a harsher criticism is that it's boring. It does unfold slowly whereas we really wish sometimes we could be like The Darkness or something,” says Bryce, laughing. “The kind of wanky guitar solos and really over the top in your face stuff has never worked with what we do.”
Whether you take the screamed assault of Alligator era songs Mr November and Abel, the spiralling, brass-pounding anthem of Mistaken For Strangers or the dense, scrambling soundscapes of Terrible Love and Conversation 16, Bryce's point rings true. Colour, light, shade and subtlety are all necessary to trace the lines Matt has sketched for The National.
It's not necessarily a happy family all of the time. Bryce admits that “(Boxer) had been really hard to make and it was very contentious between us. We were disagreeing a fair amount on which direction we wanted to take.” Even a cursory listen to each album reveals a distinct difference in atmosphere, a result of the struggles between the band. Matt's extraordinary energy means that, despite his musical inability, the band are forced to trust his opinion and his obtuse descriptions. Though this is something they've learned to accept over the last decade.
“There is tension about that because sometimes he'll be like 'turn all the guitars up' and maybe he doesn't realise that the guitar is the only thing driving the harmony of the song. At the same time Matt is an incredibly gifted songwriter and we know that so he's right about 75% of the time. You've just gotta watch out for the 25% when he's totally full of it. But he tends to have good ideas probably because he doesn't play an instrument and because he doesn't have an attachment to anything he's played. 'Oh I love that guitar part' or 'oh I love that piano part I played'. That's what happens in bands full of heavy musicians and you get that problem of everyone wanting to hear what they did. It doesn't mean its good because you did it!” explains Bryce. “Sometimes it is limiting for us because he'll speak in non-musical metaphors about ideas he has but obviously we've been doing this for a while and it works and I think maybe Michael Stipe from REM works in a similar way. It's not so unique that he's the frontman and not playing an instrument. Its certainly good for us because otherwise I think a lot of bands that seem on paper to be collaborative, really are much less so. It's like one guy with a guitar who writes the song and he probably has the final say.”
They carve their way through acres of “sketches, which are demos of songs” to filter through the foliage sprouting from Aaron, Bryce, bassist Scott Devendorf and his brother Bryan playing drums, in order to strike gold.
“We have to give Matt a lot of music, and he'll listen to maybe 50 or 60 of these. I'll do a bunch, my brother probably does most of them and then Scott will do some and Bryan contributes to the rhythm but usually later once we know what we're working on, so it works like that and Matt might take one and go 'oh it's in the wrong key' or 'it's got to be faster' or 'I don't like the finger picking guitars, let's make it dirtier' or 'I like the B section' and it goes like that and goes back and forth and I'll make like 30 versions of the same thing,. Then once we know out of those that there's a song starting it'll probably go down to 25-30 of those that we can actually work out drum beats for and start to record basic ideas in the studio all together and that then goes to another level of Matt having to finish the lyrics. Then inevitably a bunch of those get tossed out as well and we get 15 or 20 that end up being finished songs.” The huge effort involved from each member in this process accounts for Bryce saying earlier in our transatlantic phone conversation that making an album is a “long and arduous” rigmarole. The results speak for themselves. High Violet churns, savages expectations and billows gently across a broiling soundscape. Terrible Love is somehow gentile and violent before physical tension is burst across an astounding jarring workout. Bloodbuzz Ohio recalls swarms of pain across fields, while Conversation 16 manages to expound the virtues of anxiety via an escalating, aural trauma. England is the most sublime, galloping classical piece they've done and Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks is practically gospel.
“We never really have a plan. I think its hard enough to do what we do, have five people make music together that we all like. There's definitely thematic elements in the lyrics that become cohesive part of the whole record that Matt worked on for a long time. Musically my brother and I write a lot of the music and what we try and do is push the band in a new direction every time even if it's in the same palette of music that we normally work with. I started orchestrating some of the songs whereas, in the past it's been Padma Newsome. He did England, the big one as far as being orchestral, but a bunch of the others I did and as far as playing the guitar, the piano and being directly inside what the music is, maybe it is true that the orchestration is sort of glued closer to what the band is doing,” admits Bryce. Guitar distortion coils around inflamed strings, filling the songs with static charge, pianos pound into cello serenity and clarinets jostle with Bryan's astounding drum ricochets. It's an astounding use of traditional instruments within a modern setting.
“The sound on Terrible Love was kind of happenstance, a kind of combination of effects that makes that crazy, woolly sound of guitars. It was something we stumbled on and just did it and we were able to keep it. To me Boxer became really, really elegant and a very manicured kind of record and High Violet opens that up. If you listen closely there's looser guitar playing it's rough around the edge is some places.” Bryce says that working alongside Kim Deal from Pixies, her looser style and way of composing, really helped to keep parts more natural and improvised in the studio, hence the rough edges on songs that are full of grandeur. Bryce has also worked with his favourite composer Steve Reich on the latter's latest record Double Sextet/2x5, and Lee Ronaldo of Sonic Youth in the past, again citing each man's fascinating approaches to musicality bringing a lot of inspiration to The National. The beginning flux of Boxer's Fake Empire alone recalls Reich's phasing techniques.
“We're collaborative musicians by nature and that doesn't just mean within The National,” says Bryce. “I think if it was just within The National, we'd get quite claustrophobic. I don't know how much the music could evolve if we weren't constantly opening ourselves up to new things and hearing new things and seeing how other people write songs.”
A band like this isn't your typical indie success story. Yet they've sold out three nights at Brixton Academy, as well as playing a sold out Royal Albert Hall earlier this year, and that's without mentioning that the day before this interview, the band played in Madison, Wisconsin at President Obama's request before he spoke to students at the university.
As Bryce admits, they aren't likely to be recognised and mobbed on the street yet touring has become more comfortable thanks to being able to afford a crew, festival billing has risen meaning more time to play to fans and though promo schedules have become tiring now, the overall feeling is that the band have achieved what they have in the right way, slowly but surely. “A lot of our favourite bands existed off the radar for so many years. I would say certainly with the Pixies, their reunion tour was much bigger than they were back in the day and we laugh because Alligator was mentioned as a record of the decade in a lot of places that didn't even list it as a record of the year initially. So it's sort of a funny thing of what time does to music or whatever, but we certainly don't have any chips on our shoulder about not having had success earlier or anything.”
So unstar-like are they that Bryce describes Matt as a “home-person”, as he has a wife and child and really struggles when on tour. Not just that, but his writing is inspired by the everyday, by a real life back at home with his family. “A lot of our songs are about real life or maybe the way we relate to real life, because sometimes touring is surreal so I think getting off tour and going home and absorbing yourself into a daily existence around a more normal schedule is improtant for the songs, what's in the songs,” says Bryce. “I think Matt really needs to get home and soak up a normal life before he'll feel like making a new record.”
They may even have reached the apex of what they've been doing for over a decade with High Violet. Certainly the almost consistently flawless work contained on their last three records draws the kind of defeated-sounding optimism and flight in the face of fear to the very brink of it's intensity and sonic possibility.
“In a way we feel we've achieved something with High Violet and maybe it's a chapter that's kind of closing. I'm not saying we're gonna take a drastic left turn but it definitely feels like it's more open to us now because we've been refining a certain sound and maybe it'll shift next time.” Whatever steps they take, we'll always be able to celebrate the sorrow and the small victories we win everyday with these songs, or endure, as Matt Berninger puts it, the 'uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults.'
Brad Barrett
No comments:
Post a Comment