Live Report - The National in Tilburg

Live Report of The National @ 013, 2011

It is kind of like a collecting card game, The National sets. You’ve got your common cards, your uncommon cards, and then you have your rares as well. Some you hope to get every little packet you buy but you find them to be elusive, others you weren’t even thinking about and suddenly there they are. The best part is though, whatever rare cards you get, you can always construct a playable deck with whatever is given to you due to the sheer quality of the mechanics and theme of the game as a whole. Though some people in the audience (including yours truly) are far from new to the band, I think everyone got at least one or two songs they had never heard live before next to the major singles and the songs off of the most recent album. That keeps these gigs fresh, and next to that The National always deliver quality.

From the songs they played this time, ‘Son’ from their debut and the new ‘Think You Can Wait’ are perhaps the most likely tracks the audience haven’t heard yet. For ‘Son’ they say that it was one of the first songs they had ever written, and when they launch into the screamy ‘Abel’ from the Alligator album they tell the audience that this they wrote because no one had paid attention to the former track. Their deadpan delivery makes the on stage banter both amusing just as much as that it gives an insight into their songs. For ‘Afraid of Everyone’ they say it is about Washington, now London, and one of the Dessner brothers brings in an article he just read about Mussolini, to which Berninger quips that if you are a bad person, he must be, like, your hero. Matt takes over the conversation before conceding, But I don’t know, I haven’t read the article.

So no, it is not doom and gloom at The National gig, far from that. It is not like an Interpol, clouded in dark tints and mists without saying anything to the audience. They have gotten the reputation of being miserable sods, but one doesn’t get that when one of them says how great it is to, after some festivals, be indoors again, to which Matt adds, Yeah, and not have Beyonce playing over there. The guitarist concedes that they are no match for Beyonce. Speak for yourself, quips Matt. So there is enough smiling going on and people enjoying themselves.

Naturally, the actual songs are, admittedly, not all shiny beacons of positivism. They are not simply miserable complaints either. Instead, they are about the doubts, both the inner ones as well as the ones about what is happening around us, in the tradition of major poets and playwrights of the 20^th century. From the more politically tainted songs to the inward turning ‘Secret Meeting’ for example, which they picked off the Alligator album to play. Boxer has mostly the singles played, with the exception of ‘Brainy’, a rather dark song with the ambiguous ‘Boning up and reading the American dictionary’ contrasted with the sad ‘You keep changing your fancy, fancy mind / every time I decide to let go’. Most impressive perhaps in terms of the Boxer album is the transformation of ‘Squalor Victoria’ to a live behemoth, with searing guitars and Matt screaming pathetically from the top of his lungs “Squalor victoria”. From High Violet almost every song is played, with an acoustic version sans microphone of ‘Vanderlyle’ to draw curtains on the night.

The band grows as a live band year after year. From the good (not only picking songs they rarely play or haven’t played in a long time but also finding a way to incorporate for example the two-man horn section into them) to the bad (the asking for handclaps does get slightly tedious after the umpteenth go). The Dessner brothers have made some songs live positively epic with their guitars while the Devendorf brothers are still as tight as ever on drums and bass. The horns and keys add nice touches to even the older songs, and they do have to as the violin of Padma Newsome is subtracted from the whole. Now, the band is never going to go Grace Jones with the big show and so forth, but they nevertheless are a good live band. If you feel the songs on album, probably you will delight in seeing the live renditions of both your favorites as of the more obscure tracks you never ever thought you would get.