Album Review: The National’s Sleep Well Beast
A new album from The National will always be exciting to me. Even at their worst, they’re still fantastic. Sleep Well Beast is The National at their best. A strong, cohesive album, each track is in the right place, patiently leading up to an anthem or lazily coming down from the previous song. At first, I made the mistake of listening too passively. When I took the care to play it loud, listening with intent, the whole album transformed into a haunting slow burn.
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Sleep Well Beast is a snow globe of a marriage that is being shaken violently — it’s a small internal tragedy, playing out against a chaotic backdrop. Despite the myopic focus on a struggling romance, you are reminded that the world at large is not as it should be. The National can put out an album full of personal stories, ones with plenty of anxious melancholy and existential dread. In Sleep Well Beast, Berninger is exercising the ghosts of a troubled, or honest, marriage. Co-written with his wife, they shine a light on the hardest parts of being in love. They capture the tragic nature of man so beautifully there is no need to turn their gaze elsewhere. But as Berninger sings in “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness”, “we’re in a different kind of thing now”.
As seen in Boxer, High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me, it’s obvious The National know how to set a scene. The first track is a quiet discussion between a couple, vowing more substance later. Despite the intimacy, it’s different than what is expected. There is a lazy drum machine beat, instead of Bryan Devendorf’s powerful percussions. Berninger’s voice takes on a gravelly slur, not his typical punk rock croon. The second track delivers on the promises made in the first. The sprinting drums, the baritone chant — “The Day I Die” is a riotous tantrum. It is arena rock for thoughtful, sad, middle-aged men, like “Terrible Love” or “Mistaken for Strangers” before it.
Throughout Sleep Well Beast, we are reminded that this tragedy is playing out within a larger, more tragic moment. “Walk It Back” wanders past the collapse of a relationship. It is self-centered, but within the context of a greater (also depressing) political landscape conjured through the alleged Karl Rove quote ending the track. Another nod to their past, “Turtleneck” is an Alligator-era punk anthem of disaffected youth. It seems the current political climate has provoked a sneering angst not associated with The National in over a decade. Several songs are more up-tempo than we’ve heard in a while. “Guilty Party” is drum and bass-quick and the eponymous final track is equally glitchy and swift-footed. The dreamy, emo waltz “Dark Side of the Gym” and “Empire Line” are desperately romantic. This album is full of emotion, from pleading agony to aloof, simmering anger. A few songs are less moving than others. “Carin at the Liquor Store” and “Born to Beg” are standard National tracks. They’re evocative and meandering, but feel slightly out of place on an otherwise knock-out album.
There are hallmarks of The National’s work that make for exceptional music. The startling candor of the lyrics. Creative, pronounced percussions. Untraditional structure in surprisingly catchy songs. Those details are all present in Sleep Well Beast, with a few new tricks thrown in for good measure. There are landscapes of the past — people, music, and moments engaged listeners will know from previous albums. In addition to recapturing the magic of albums past, Sleep Well Beast does something special and necessary in 2017. It expresses the anxiety of living in time when you’re swept out to sea by a tide of uncertainty. At the same time, The National take care to indulge in the insignificant theatrics that make us human. Fights at a party; a pleading make up; all the tiny moments between people who know each other so well their individual narratives combine to create one story against the backdrop of a national (lower case “n”) catastrophe.
