What happens when the band that has soundtracked the milestones of your adulthood suddenly feels like it has nothing left to give you?
, on the day last month when my wife, Tina, and I finally set foot in our new house, thousands of miles from where we'd always lived.
This boosterism and backbiting have only endeared The National to me, because they've inflamed the kind of passions I don't expect with seemingly inert indie rock in this decade. There was the time in 2010 I flew to Manhattan after a late night spent consummating some short-lived, high-velocity love affair. I was visiting the city to interview a different artist, but I listened to the then-newon repeat in the city streets, the music's mystery matching my wonder with the place and my lust back home. The National's wild days seemed to be there still — but fading, settling into songs that surveyed more stable horizons.
For the better part of an hour, though, The National sounds like a sophisticated lounge act. Drums lope through vaporous guitars and electronic hazes, the band framing middle-aged, upper-middle-class brooding with a nonchalance that suggests such sentiments barely take work at this point. There are murmurs of insomnia, narcolepsy and tinnitus. There are multiple odes to escaping social obligations and testimonials to ennui and resulting existential dread.
I am left to wonder, then, if it is too much to want The National to become something more than they've always been, to write or sound like more than a sad-dad repository after nearly a quarter-century working.
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