8 January 2009 :: impeccable

:: Concert-Review /⊙ Features Home

Nobody’s right all the time. Matt Berninger of The National, the singer/lyricist who once wrote “This sound I make / That only lasts the season / And only heard by bedroom kids who buy for that reason,” has more than proven himself a poor prophet after the continuing success of his band and its latest LP, Alligator. The album was largely considered one of the finest of 2005, and while the group may not be a household name yet, it’s closer than ever after an abundance of critical favor and a US tour with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Back on the road after a break back home in Brooklyn, The National returned to Los Angeles on March 29 to the open arms of bedroom kids and American Apparel-clad hipsters alike.

L.A. shows are always a bit of a gamble, especially in a smaller venue like The Troubadour. Too often, people show up on a Friday night at places such as Silverlake’s The Echo just to make the scene and get drunk. Thankfully, this was not the case on Wednesday; there was no shortage of beer breath at the sold-out show, but it was on the lips of audience members mouthing every word. That didn’t stop them from being fashionably late, though, and most of the crowd didn’t show up until just before The National’s set.

Those who arrived a little late didn’t miss much. Even if I hadn’t just locked myself out of my car and prompted a sense of total paranoia, I would have had trouble taking opener Baby Dayliner seriously: with a haircut borrowed from Vanilla Ice and a cowboy-ish outfit begging for a Brokeback joke, he’s the only live musician I’ve ever seen just sing karaoke. This is probably an unfair evaluation – the songs were good, genre-jumping easily between styles of the 70s (sunny pop), 80s (synth-rock) and 90s (electronica), and he reassured us that he wrote and produced all of it himself. Still, it was more than a little awkward to watch him prancing around by himself on stage, though what was there of the crowd applauded enthusiastically. Talkdemonic followed, and put on a hypnotic, if repetitive, set of instrumental folktronica performed by two live musicians and a laptop.

The real excitement was reserved for the headliners, and with a packed house in front of them, the tall, lanky Berninger slumped into the microphone and The National’s five members set to work. The band opened with “Secret Meeting” and never lost momentum, running through most of Alligator and a few older tracks. The songs were longer, looser, louder – “The Geese of Beverly Road” finished not with Berninger singing, as it does on the album, but with frenetic guitar work. If “All The Wine” was raucous, “Mr. November” was the night’s most intense performance: Berninger held the microphone high over his head and shouted the song’s chorus skyward, gripping the mic wire intently as the band casually rocked out. Not ones for onstage theatrics, the two pairs of brothers that comprise the rest of the band were not so much restrained as they were cool under pressure.

In retrospect, maybe there wasn’t any pressure after all. Even when the band played two mostly unrecognized songs during the encore, the crowd was content to let the music speak for itself. It’s already been a full year since Alligator’s initial release, but it looks like the songs of The National are going to last for a lot longer than anyone could have expected.

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