National express
Gloomy, often magnificient Ohio five-piece The National are set for massive success this year.
John Walshe, 17 Jan 2006
The National’s third album, Alligator, was one of the sleeper hits of 2005. While the band, from Ohio and based in New York, has been treading the boards for six years, it seems The National’s time has finally arrived.
Mixing Tindersticks-style brooding with the energy of Interpol, Alligator saw the group hitting new creative highs, where the melancholia of ‘Baby We’ll Be Fine’ sat comfortably alongside the raw anger of ‘Abel’. The reaction to the LP was overwhelmingly positive, particularly on this side of the Atlantic.
“The people who reviewed our earlier records were generally very glowing about them, but with Alligator it just happened on a much larger scale,” admits singer Matt Berninger. “We do read reviews occasionally and it’s fun to read when somebody really gets into and is excited about the record. But the fact that there are more people hearing about us now is the most exciting thing.”
It could be argued that until Alligator took their music to a wider audience, The National seemed to revel in their underdog status.
Berninger disagrees: “I don’t think we ever reveled in it. It was sort of a badge or something. But the truth is, if we could have been immediately well-known and popular, we would have chosen that route. That said, it’s really satisfying that through hard times when nobody really heard about us, we continued to make records that we love. We’ve never really been affected by the amount of attention we received. So now that we’re getting it, it’s like a bonus.”
They certainly have always plowed their own furrow, which Berninger maintains (only half-jokingly) owed a lot to laziness.
“I think it would have been harder to try to sound like somebody else,” he laughs. “That would have been too much work.”
Guitarist Aaron Dessner intervenes: “When we started playing in Matt’s bedroom, we loved the chemistry then and we still love the chemistry now. We were definitely outside a lot of the things that were happening in New York [at the time] but we’ve now found our audience and they’re really getting what we do, so that’s exciting. For instance, this year was the first time that we’ve sold out shows outside New York or Paris.”
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