THE NATIONAL - "BOXER"

Highly Recommended

Last weekend’s much-touted bout between Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. was another in a waning string of attempts to resuscitate the sport of professional boxing. With the amount of money and media that went into promoting this thing you’d think that it would be the show of the year, but unfortunately it was nothing more than high gloss tongue whetting for gambling enthusiasts, high end sports bars, b-list celebrities, and reality television dramatists – completely predictable and empty of consequence. The National’s upcoming release fittingly titled "Boxer” evokes both the nostalgia for and the hopelessness of the once prideful, now dying sport. With characters both barbaric and defeated, the songs on “Boxer” create reflexive melancholic portraits of aborted humanity in shimmering warm washes.

With his boozy, bruiser, bawl, singer Matt Berninger brings these characters to life, imparting his own staggering baritone to each subject with unwavering efficacy. This album has the heft and weight that was missing from last years inconsistent “Alligator” yet feels in keeping with the evolution of a band that is restless and ready to move on to something bigger and better.

The piano is right up front in the mix counter-pointing Berninger’s grave vocals and taking a cue from Springsteen balladry which has become so common a touchstone for bands these days like the Hold Steady and Arcade Fire. In fact, upon first listening to “Boxer”, I commented to my friend D-Ton that I thought that The National were approaching the same sonic drama levels that the Arcade Fire have harnessed so effectively in their two full length albums and honed in their live show. Though each song maintains the self-serious approach as songs on “Alligator”, the songs on “Boxer” come in tight packages with the drama of a three act story, building slowly, harmonically, instrumentally, and rhythmically, reaching a crescendo and fading out quickly, leaving you dazed on the mat, waiting for the next round. Of course I have to mention that The Arcade Fire have announced that The National will be opening for them on many of their tour dates and I have since congratulated myself on having made the most appropriate mental band pairing since Beck and Hank III.

The first seven tracks of the album are equally stunning and the sequencing couldn’t have been better. Such consistency from track to track with the repetition of musical and lyrical elements reminds me of the crisis level urgency of The Walkmen’s 2004 release “Bows + Arrows”. Stand out tracks include opener “Fake Empire”, summer singalong “Green Gloves”, vampy Replacements romp “Apartment Story”, and rueful closer “Gospel”. Other than the inclusion of “Gospel” I think the album could have ended at track seven as the repetition that works so well for the first seven songs only numbs with the watered down album end.

The image on the cover of "Boxer” is telling. The National continue to grow as a band as they observe and absorb the world around them, consequently reflecting a specific time and place endowed with the importance that only such dramatic music can. What distinguishes them from other bands attempting the same thing is that they belong in the worlds they describe and count themselves wholly amongst the rejected characters whose stories they tell.