The National isn’t a particularly cool band to wax poetic about — at least to hordes of flask-sneaking, vaguely baby-faced young adults at Coachella, for example. They’re best regarded as fixtures of the liminal indie rock phase of the early 2010s, sandwiched in between the garage rock revival heyday of the early to late aughts and the uncertain post-post-rock era of today. And perhaps at their most bromidic, they’re the band that’s playing in the background at your uncle’s dinner party in Dayton, where one’s guzzling one chardonnay after another, mostly in nonchalant bemusement at the incessant retreads of familiar dad jokes.
In 2023, following Bryce and Aaron Dessner’s contributions to Taylor Swift’s recent chamber rock-infused albums Folklore and Evermore, the band released two albums of their own: First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track. These latest records are emblematic of this winding down from a period of cultural cachet; they’re capable, often expressive works, but don’t quite reach the heights of Trouble Will Find Me or Sleep Well Beast.
But maybe it is precisely this that makes The National, in a more unexpected sense, suited to our current moment. In an interview with NME earlier this year, frontman and lyricist Matt Berninger was candid about his yearlong battle with depression, writer’s block and substance abuse — having quit alcohol over the previous year. In a (presumably) post-pandemic landscape, the creative vacuity he spoke of is one that many artists have found themselves in; it is from this state that the 23 tracks off of the two albums were born.
This is not to say that a bygone vacuousness is what defines The National’s recent LPs. On Nov. 10 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, the band proved that this is far from the case — despite the prevailing audience demographic of mid-millennial, plaid-clad, beer-swigging Bay Area technology employees that may have signaled otherwise.
The indie rock group began their set with a deeper cut, performing “Sea of Love” from Trouble Will Find Me in a return to what many consider their magnum opus. “I see people on the floor/ They slide into the sea/ Can’t stay here anymore/ We’re turning into fiends,” Berninger crooned, an appropriately anxious stanza to sing into a sea of awaiting listeners. “Tell me how to reach you/ I see you rushing down (Don’t drag me in)/ What did Harvard teach you?” There was a room full of liberal arts-educated individuals all sliding into the band’s sea of love, and Berninger knew it. Perhaps this opener was indicative of The National’s self-conscious peddling between the interstices within performance — of the barrier between performer and crowd characteristic of concerts altogether.
Over the course of the show, the band found itself returning to more recent tracks. “Tropic Morning News,” for instance, evoked a trenchant, pandemic-era doom-scrolling ennui. “I wasn’t ready at all/ To say anything about anything interesting,” Berninger hummed, the song serving as a counterintuitive turning point at which Berninger found himself able to write again.
A standout from The National’s recent work First Two Pages of Frankenstein, “New Order T-Shirt,” recalled a nostalgic, earnest yearning and lyrical narrativizing that’s attributed to the band’s best songs. “I keep what I can of you/ Split-second glimpses and snapshots and sounds/ You in my New Order T-shirt/ Holding a cat and a glass of beer,” the band’s frontman sang, conjuring an image that traverses the threshold between memory and the present, of what romantic potential feels like and of what love is.
Perhaps the most striking performance of the night was the band’s rendition of “Pink Rabbits,” an elegy to the wistfulness and disquieting melancholy that can endure (for Berninger, at least) even within long-term relationships. But what made it decisively indelible was not just this reflection on the track but the semiotic significance it held in the auditorium. “You didn’t see me I was falling apart/ I was a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park,” Berninger confessed. As couples held onto each other and throngs of white girls swayed, cans of beers in hand, one couldn’t help but chuckle at the apt specificity of the band’s lyrics.
The National ended its encore with a return to their 2010 record High Violet, performing “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” in a lachrymose yet still affecting spectacle. “All the very best of us string ourselves up for love,” Berninger sang in his final refrain. And as white girls falling apart in a crowd of white girls in a park, perhaps this is a notion we shouldn’t shy away from.
