Matt Berninger’s assurance that he’ll always end up suffering is contradictorily, perhaps as certain as the inevitable cathartic quality of his latest musical outpouring. After a critically acclaimed back catalogue, especially 2007’s Boxer and 2011’s High Violet, The National are now almost immovably entrenched as some of our greatest contemporary songwriters. But for a band whose success has stemmed from wearing their hearts on their sleeves, and being open and vulnerable, their accomplishment must have taken its toll.
From the offset, ‘I Should Live In Salt’ guarantees that Trouble Will Find Me will plough much the same furrow as their previous efforts. Matt’s guilt-ridden ballad about his brother sets a beautifully elegiac tone. The repeated phrase “You should know me better than that” highlights some trivial differences at the start of the song, but quickly transforms into a poignant commentary on sibling relationships. Even just two songs in, TWFM is sounding luscious as ever, but with Matt’s potent baritone rumbling inspired but melancholic lyrics, there’s a challenging contradiction between the songs’ wholesome instrumentation and their oft harrowing content. This is present none more so than on lead single ‘Demons’, which encapsulates everything ascribed to The National’s brilliance. It’s lyrically astute, but the metaphors aren’t so obtuse as to supersede the simple despondent message, and in fact the final verse’s confessional concluding lines – “When I walk into a room/I do not light it up/Fuck” – are devastatingly simple; the gravitas of the admission surmised perfectly by the simple expletive.
It’s songs like that which might explain why it must be emotionally jarring to write such substantial music; there’s nothing flippant about The National, and that must be very difficult to maintain, especially with the rest of life to fight through too. There’s one of many passages in ‘High Fidelity’ that talks about life and music that reads: “I find myself worrying away at that stuff about pop music again, whether I like it because I’m unhappy, or whether I’m unhappy because I like it … Those of us who absorb emotional things all day can never feel merely content; we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve.” The monologue goes on to suggest that it’s hard to sort out your love life if you’re day-to-day life revolves around music, or anything that really makes you feel on a regular basis. And it’s kind of sad to think it, but those ideas must have some grounding in the real world. At what point does Matt Berninger stop writing forlorn melodies because he’s troubled, and start being troubled because all he does is write forlorn melodies?
And once that notion materialised itself in my head, I couldn’t stop it from taking over. The rest of TWFM passed a lot more slowly. Like in the early hours of the morning when you’re floating in and out of sleep, I was semi-conscious, wrapped up in the drones of ‘Graceless’ one moment, then snapped into intense clarity by a certain lyric or musical detail the next, only to find myself back to thinking about men suits in singing a song called ‘Sorrow’ for six-hours without a break on a grey afternoon in New York and then going home and trying to smile at their wives and daughters…
TWFM is less immediate than High Violet, but it moved me in an intensely cerebral way that only a handful of records have ever done. And there’s no point trying to run, because it’ll find you too somehow, you’ve just got to understand the trouble, because once you do, it’s beautiful.
