The National - Alligator

Grows on you

When I first got this CD I thought it was just puffery and couldn't get into it. Today it clicked for me and I haven't stopped listening to it, though I can't quite say why. This group needs to watch their step... they're dangerously close to having their music overwhelmed by that chic, hip and... empty ooze that sticks to many irksome indie bands when they get attention. I guess it's about not being too clever for their own good, staying humble enough to take risks and especially not pursuing polish for its own sake or, worse, cultivating an absence of polish for its own sake. Get it? June 26, 2008

MDAWG

A great album all around. The monotone vocals complement the colorful guitar and bass rifts throughout the album. Just a well engineered and well ordered album. The feeling of the songs flow into one another beautifuly. June 25, 2008

Very good

This is not my favorite National album, but it's close. Like most albums by this band, the CD is excellent from start to finish. June 19, 2008

Enigmatic, Hypnotic, Terrific

"I need some meaning I can memorize," Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst once sang. It was a great lyric about a universal need--the need to not just find meaning in this complicated world, but to reduce that meaning into simple truths we can take with us everywhere. And this exquisite album by The National sounds like it was tailor-made to fill that bill. In fact, these songs aren't just memorizable--they're unforgettable.

First, a little note. By my reckoning, there are two types of music lovers: horn people and string people. Horn people can listen to string music, and vice versa, and large swaths of music have neither instrument, but everyone has a preference between the two. For the most part, horns are happy, upbeat daytime instruments. They do some mournful songs, but it's not an everyday thing. And so horn people are bright and full of sunshine, and they get married and live in the suburbs and have 2.3 kids and are always in bed by 10.

This is a string person's album.

But it's far more than that. "Alligator" is one of the most listenable and captivating and sadly underappreciated albums to come our way since the turn of the millennium. It's an album with a lot to say about our loves and lives and lies. If you're anything like me, you'll listen to it a lot, and the more you listen to it, the more you want to listen to it. And you'll save it for after nightfall, for it's one of those lonely, staring-out-your-window-at-the-night-streets albums.

You can trust this album, because it's honest with its feelings, and because it's consistent in the best possible sense--not the I-don't-have-a-lot-of-ideas sense, but the everything's-in-its-right-place sense. Some of the songs are slow and sad, but even the up-tempo ones aren't happy; they are just full of urgency and immediacy to counter the smoky languor elsewhere. The guitars are sometimes charged and sometimes mellow, the strings are sorrowful, and everything swirls together beautifully. And floating half-submerged through the mix, we hear Matt Berninger's wonderful baritone, always sounding as if it's either drowning in drink or spewing it out in anger. It's a perfect voice for this music, sadder than the strings, lonelier than the walk of shame.

Some people sing to the masses; Berninger's singing for an audience of one. You. Actually, it's not so much you, the listener, as it is "you." You the significant other, you the ex, you the best friend and betrayer, you the member of a relationship so important it rarely needs proper nouns. He does name names, here and there--Karen, John, Val Jester, Abel--but in a sense they don't matter. "You're the low life of the party," he sings on "Lit Up", and you don't know if he's singing at you or singing your thoughts, but it works either way, because if you're anything like me, you've lived these songs as the singer, or the singee, or both, and you can play your mental Mad Libs and fill in your own names as needed.

Still, one senses this is a deeply personal album. "Yeah say something perfect, something I can steal," Berninger sings on "Baby We'll Be Fine," and you know (or at least I know, because I spent years quoting my friends and lovers and presenting it as fiction) that's the line of an artist who is literally putting all of himself into his work. There are plenty of stellar moments on this album, but that song highlights what's best about this band. In it, Berninger chants "I'm so sorry for everything," over and over, so often you end up thinking the guy must be Catholic. The specific meaning's enigmatic, but the effect is still hypnotic; these are the mantras we tell others, and tell ourselves, to make this complicated world make sense.
April 9, 2008

I wish I could give it ten stars!

This album renewed my faith and love in recent music. I bought it a couple of years ago and, as soon as I popped it into the stereo, was unable to take it out. It's rare (or impossible) that most people get to say this about any record, but I'm saying it: it's on a short list of albums that have changed my life.

March 10, 2008

More reviews at Amazon.com ...