Aphera Music

Matt Berninger has a flair for stringing things together. This is a man who claims to write down thoughts on the backs of magazines and then piece them into lyrics. Even while writing a song, combining triplets of a piano bass line and eighth notes of the other hand, he constructs the delicately off-kilter opening of “Fake Empire”. Hanging the words “ballet”, “ice” and “bluebirds”, side by side, he generates the lyrics, “do your gay ballet on ice, bluebirds on our shoulders.” In 2009, Berninger even managed to pull together a collection of the most talented indie artists to make Dark was the Night, a compilation album benefiting Red Hot Organization.

His technique does not rely on telling a story, conveying an idea, but instead on his own intuition – he’s a creator of a symbiotic relationship between the spoken words and played sounds.

But it’s almost as if Berninger finally reached a point where this strategy has become too formulaic. In High Violet, the opener “Terrible Love” chants an obnoxiously repetitive melody with similarly annoying and also nonsensical lyrics, “Terrible Love, I’m walking with spiders”.  The novelty of such phrases has worn off, and the repetitive melody throughout the album doesn’t allow for surprise. The mind begins to fill in the blanks and predict too much.

Of course Berninger’s layering, beautiful piano harmonies, baritone voice, mesh together well – as they did in Boxer. But, he’s missing the subtlety that made Boxer so special. Instead he followed his usual formula and made an album that is just a little too obvious to last a very long time.

The succession of songs in the album even seems to follow his method. Scroll through the beginning of each song and from the double beat of the bass drum in “Anyone’s Ghost”, to the single, opening, VCR like tone of  “Little Faith”, and the harmonium strike in “Everyone is Afraid” – and you will see that the National achieved variety – they pieced together an eclectic, but limited style of songs to make their album. Yet, the songs’ lack of surprise and lack of emotional anticipation make them far behind those in Boxer.

Comparable to Coldplay’s X&Y, High Violet is indeed, as Chris Martin once put it, the strip mall behind the cleared path cut with a machete. The only difference is that while Chris Martin was referring to Radiohead “clearing the way”, in The National’s case, it’s they who cleared their own path yet set up a strip mall behind themselves. They reverted a few steps back and regressed a little. An excellent album ought to show a clear progression and evolution of a band. This is where High Violet fails – it’s same old same old.

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