Happy 20th Anniversary to The National’s eponymous debut album The National, originally released October 30, 2001.
It took too many of us too long to notice, but The National owned their cerebral brand of rock from the very beginning. And despite their indie stardom today, their self-titled debut remains largely unrecognized 20 years later.
It wouldn’t be until their third album, Alligator (2005), that they’d begin to garner widespread attention from the press. In the meantime, they quietly cultivated their talents, moonlighting as musicians in singer Matt Berninger’s unconverted Brooklyn loft after slogging through day jobs in corporate America.
While Interpol, The Strokes, The Walkmen and other New York City-based bands strutted in the subterranean limelight at Lower East Side venues like Luna Lounge and Mercury Lounge, The National often unassumingly took the stage before nightfall—hours before their trendy, media-friendly headlining neighbors.
“We developed in the shadows,” Berninger explained during a 2016 Off Camera interview. “I think we kinda got lucky that nobody took our picture for awhile….We got to get through some of the most awkward growing pains kinda in the shadows when no one was really watching. And nobody was expecting much.”
My story with The National didn’t start until the year of Alligator’s release, but I fondly recall these so-called “growing pains.” The first time I saw The National was at Mezzanine, a relatively small (now sadly defunct) venue in San Francisco. And as much as I was struck by the immensity of the music, I was also wholly charmed by their shy demeanor.
The antithesis of a flamboyant rockstar, Berninger frequently turned away from the audience, opting instead to face his bandmates, tapping his fists to the sides of his arms, as if taking nervous solace in familiar friends and sounds. I found it all endearing, thoroughly appreciating the fact that abounding passion overrode the debilitating fright.
Even the band’s name was intentionally understated. The National had an amorphous, unadorned appeal to it. Generic and innocuous, the moniker served as a blank slate, coolly awaiting its riches.
The National’s first record arrived a few years into the group’s collective New York existence. Berninger and bassist Scott Devendorf had met 10 years prior as graphic design students at the University of Cincinnati. Sharing a penchant for Pavement, they played together in a band called Nancy for five years before relocating to Brooklyn. Half a decade later, they joined forces with Devendorf’s brother, Bryan—drummer and longtime friends with twin guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner.
Over the years, The National have assembled an ever-growing ensemble of talent to texturize and round out their sound. But, the first National record materialized in modest fashion, with just a handful of players convening in Brooklyn and New Haven. In fact, The National is credited to just a four-piece band—with Aaron on bass and Scott on guitar, swapping their usual roles. I was also surprised to learn that while Bryce Dessner collaborated on the album, he didn’t officially join the band until a few months later.
Co-produced by audio engineer Nick Lloyd and The National themselves, the eponymous debut was released on the Dessner brothers’ label Brassland Records on the eve of Halloween.
And, while The National undoubtedly flail around my mind every month of the year, they pair well with the galvanizing briskness of the shivery seasons.
Pensive, electric, heady, The National press deeply into every violet bruise of emotion. “I don't know if I'd call it self-loathing,” Berninger told the Atlanta-based outlet Creative Loafing. “I think it's more like self-indulgence. A lot of these songs were written in the winter when it was cold, and I'd go home and drink and dwell on mistakes I'd made. There's a lot of pining on the record.”
This is a world of woozy epiphanies. And the wine-winged writer in me can certainly relate to these moments of solitary transformation. The scrawlings in a cocktail-stained journal (or sprawling drafts in the Notes app)—all evidence of the uncoiling meditative mind after a frosty night of drinking.
Some may construe such “self-indulgence” as wallowing—or self-medication. But I call it giving yourself the time and space to feel the feeling. And The National—in all their visceral introspection—have never refrained from the brutal necessity of reflection.
Indeed, the hallmarks of The National’s aesthetic came alive in this first-ever effort, with lyrics thinly veiling pain with playful turn of phrase. The words—standalone bardic beauties unto themselves—beg to be contemplated and perhaps one day deciphered.
Add to that Berninger’s baritone vocal delivery, which has over the years drawn comparisons to everyone from Ian Curtis to Leonard Cohen to Tom Waits (sometimes I even hear my mom’s beloved Neil Diamond), yet uniquely wraps each letter with warmth and texture, twisting syllables in ways that make my neurons spin.
And, of course, at the nucleus of The National is the masterful underlying instrumentation, which often sparks Berninger’s songwriting process—with the poetry of the verse catapulted to new levels by the poignant composition.
Somewhere betwixt a runaway thought and imagined conversation, “Beautiful Head” opens The National, a fitting beginning to the discography’s never-ending psychological riddle. Against a jangly, up-tempo beat, the narrator dissolves into doubt and rejection, half-arguing, half-pleading with his lover: “Do not tell me I’ve changed / You’re just raising your standards / Do not give me away / I am the same / I am the same.” As Berninger punches through the chorus a second time, it’s as if where he was once trying to convince her, he’s now trying to convince himself.
Though we may show constancy of character over time, we are not unchanging. And, in the realm of The National, this quandary is cause for much scintillating contemplation. Perhaps kickstarted here, on their debut, as Berninger wrote the words on the cusp of his 30th birthday.
Fortunate though I was to have discovered The National in 2005, what I wouldn’t give to have happened upon them at their inception.
Part of the reason is the second track The National ever gave the world—the ridiculously underrated, swoonworthy-in-every-way “Cold Girl Fever.”
Like “Beautiful Head,” the song is lyrically pretty heartbreaking, if not moreso. But between its dreamy, gauzy feel and Berninger’s vocals, it’s hard not to succumb to its wintry white beauty. His easy delivery of these lines (“Put your spine in your back and your arms in your coat / Don’t hold on to me when there’s nothing to hold”) alone will likely give me chills forever.
If “Cold Girl Fever” offers a dash of romance (at least to my strange ears), then the sardonically titled “The Perfect Song” tears the illusion asunder, with the narrator dwindling into drink as he ruminates on the rending of the relationship: “I never try to find you / I hope you don’t remember me / But I hope you’re not alone / And I don’t wanna know what you’re thinking / I’m looking out the window / Just sitting there / Sitting down and fucking drinking.”
If only he’d found that elusive something (“that perfect song”), he might’ve saved them. At this point, he knows it’s over, but clearly has yet to make peace.
Working through snippets of distant conversation, played-out memories, and feelings of inadequacy, “The Perfect Song” unfurls with a raw, unapologetic simplicity that serves as a compelling counterpoint to the many abstract images that pervade the album.
It’s also more typical of The National’s first two albums, which at times teeter into alt country territory, with twangier moments—like “Pay for Me” and “John’s Star”—that you might expect from an Austinite dive-bar band. It’s certainly a far cry from the symphonic soundscapes conjured in later years, but still there thrives a singular magic.
Most fans of The National will tell you they didn’t love them from the start. It’s because it takes time for the thrilling nuance to find you. At some point, however, some surreptitious flourish or undercurrent artfully seeps into your brain, and suddenly that song is all that you need.
As much as The National’s music feels personal, the albums tend to be filled with a host of other characters—literary figures surrounding the narrator that together tell a greater American story, perhaps observed strangers at a bar or a pastiche of real people. It’s emblematic of life’s ongoing negotiation, I suppose, navigating private thoughts and affairs amidst the nonstop whirligig of society.
Throughout The National, Berninger often invokes natural elements like water to both create a common backdrop, but also convey a tenuous, murky hold. I get the sense that although reaching for connection, he feels alienated—and not quite enmeshed with most things.
“Theory of the Crows” exposes but one recurring conflict and rails against quotidian corporate routine: “Pouring my fingers across the keys / Will someone review my salary please / I'm selling my time to the man who sells style / That time should be mine to waste on you.” We feel suffocated by certain ubiquitous constructs, but go through the motions, often denying or forgetting our true calling.
For that reason alone, The National should give us all hope. By typical rockstar standards, this was a band that started too late in the uncoolest of ways.
But, two decades on, it’s exceptionally clear: The National knew their creative strengths from their earliest days. And while they’ve certainly experimented and evolved, their debut is wildly in keeping with the magnificent artists they are today.
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