Rainy Day Music #7: High Violet
April 1, 2014
Last week, I featured an album (Is This It by the Strokes) that was a great antidote for rain, a listen so enjoyable that it could banish the blues from any gray day. This week’s pick is the opposite, an album for wallowing in those puddles. Thanks to Music Director and WVAU dad Cameron Meindl for nominating High Violet by the National as our sixth Rainy Day Album.
Released in 2010, High Violet is the fifth album by Ohio via Brooklyn indie rockers the National, and represents a sort of creative peak for the band. A trilogy of excellent albums led up to it: 2003’s lushly brooding Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, 2005’s mightily brooding Alligator, and 2007’s broodingly brooding Boxer. All three contained a mix of narcotized post-punk rhythms, luxuriant instrumentation, and the National’s defining element, frontman Matt Berninger. In an elegant baritone, Berninger filled these albums with tale after tale of dying relationships, often marriages. Did I mention they were brooding?
Each of these albums represented musical progress for the band. Alligator was a crystallization of Sad Songs ’ scattered vision, and with Boxer the band truly hit their stride, creating what many consider to be their best work. Boxer brought their style to a point of perfection, and with the critical and commercial success it enjoyed, the pressure was on to outdo it. And thus High Violet was born. If Boxer was a plateau, then High Violet was a jump from it, abandoning all risk in a grab for new musical heights.
Of course, a jump is just a glorified fall, and High Violet plunges full on into the gloom that was already pretty apparent in the National’s catalog. On this album, Berninger’s lyrics have gone slightly insane ÛÒ his usual meticulously detailed relationship flameouts are supplemented here by abstract visions of insects, ghosts and violent fantasies. Where previous albums focused on the darker parts of interpersonal relationships, High Violet universalizes the darkness until it becomes an omnipresent aspect of modern life.
On many songs, Berninger sounds desperate in a way that only he can, a grown man at the end of his rope. “Terrible Love” climaxes with the frontman’s anguished admittance that “it takes an ocean not to breakÛ, and on standout paranoid heartbreaker “Afraid of Everyone” cries that he doesn’t “have the drugs to sort it out.” On “Little Faith” Berninger starts a fire “just to see what it kills,” and at the end of “Conversation 16” he has become so depraved in a passionless relationship that he ponders his partner’s sleeping head and worries that he will eat her brain.
The music on High Violet is beautifully arranged by the multi-instrumentalist Dessner brothers, surrounding Berninger with a lushness that belies his inner turmoil. Unlike Interpol, to whom the National are often compared, this is not the guitar’s show. On “Runaway,” mournful horns pop up, and on “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” a weeping string section appears. On “Anyone’s Ghost” and “Sorrow” Bryan Devendorf’s drums beat out a tattoo, but on “Terrible Love” they’re all but absent. On “Conversation 16,” backing vocals add an ethereal moment. Guitar and piano are used as flourishes, adding moments of supplemental drama or beauty to the album’s rich tonal color.
Any of the National’s albums would probably be a good rainy day album- all are somber, antisocial affairs. So why did Cameron pick High Violet? First of all, this album is lyrically obsessed with water. About half of the songs contain references to oceans, floods, drowning and often rain itself. Mentioned locales (New York, London, Ohio) are all dreary, and nameless characters get lost in sheets of rain. This rainy milieu was not present before High Violet, and it serves to further distance this album from its more earthly predecessors.
Second, while other National albums may be greater accomplishments, High Violet goes the farthest into Matt Berninger’s abyss. While the instrumentation changes from song to song, the mood is incredibly consistent, an ever deepening sense of atrophy in the face of entropy. Whether infatuated with depression (“SorrowÛ), losing all self-worth (“Anyone’s GhostÛ), putting on a brave face for family when terrified of the world (“Afraid of EveryoneÛ), or moving away from that family (“Bloodbuzz, OhioÛ), Berninger on High Violet is a man in a storm, a literal one in all of his lyrical rain as well as the storm of crises that define modern adulthood. Other National albums, while rain-compatible, would work better on a dark night. High Violet is for rain alone.
