Yeah, yeah, Molly is reviewing the new National album, no surprises there.
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If High Violet was shot through with a fear of love, its reality versus its ideal, then Trouble Will Find Me is about the fear of losing that love, real, imagined, strong, fragile, destructive, healing. That's what the album feels like - the beginning of a recovery, complete with doubts and sneaking fears. Demons says it best: "I get the sudden sinking feeling / Of a man about to fly" There's simultaneously an ease to it and a fragility, as if waiting for the other shoe to drop but willing to see that you've got a good thing going. Even if it feels like the slightest slip could shatter it."I don't want you to grieve / But I want you to sympathise / I can't blame you for losing your mind for a little while / So did I," sings Matt, on Slipped. And a little later, in I Need My Girl; "I know I was a lot of things / But I am good, I am grounded." The music itself, as nuanced as ever, is gentler, this time around. It's cooler, calmer; more about the contrast between the clean open space
and the shadows intrinsic to their sound. Where Boxer was shrouded, Trouble Will Find Me is exposed to the light, in spirit as well as sound. The metaphors aren't as oblique, and every line tastes of a confession. It makes the album accessible, relatable; but still the metaphors are there, still strange, still them. It's still a warm record, though, for all that - but it feels more at ease with itself than any album before it. It's something to while away the afternoon with, not something to listen to in the middle of the night with nothing but the glow of your computer screen to keep you company. But the darkness of their previous albums is still there in songs like the glorious This Is The Last Time, and the rain-slicked Fireproof.
It's different, this new, more open sound - but it's still unmistakably a National album. More cohesive, yes - the songs so interwoven that listening to it in pieces feels almost like blasphemy - and some will say more mature. But that's just one of those phrases, isn't it? The truth is that they've always had that maturity, hiding away in songs like 29 Years and Lucky You; it's just that with every song from Secret Meeting onward they've been shifting, through raucous Abel to majestic Mistaken For Strangers and from there to Anyone's Ghost - it's a progression, and as different as Trouble Will Find Me seems it's also nigh on inevitable. The band have become more and more comfortable with themselves as time has gone on - and this is the result. An album made up of great song upon great song, confident and self-assured. Like every album of theirs it benefits from repeated listens, benefits from burying yourself in it and not surfacing for a week - but, that said, there's an immediacy hiding in Sea Of Love and Graceless that grabs you from the very first note. I don't know how they do it - how every album is better than all those that went before - but they've pulled it off. Again.
And the next one will be even better, you'll see.
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