#god i love her introduction. it's concise and quiet and does everything in its power to charm you and it WORKS

[mindshelter]

weeps. she's so funny

spider-man 2099 (1992) #23

[sinceileftyoublog]

Summerfest 2019: 6/30

Guided By Voices

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Of all of the straight, white, buttoned-up indie rock bands of the 2000′s, The National have endured because they’ve subverted those very expectations, at first with Matt Berninger co-writing with his wife Carin Besser and now with the band including women as not just prominent but lead parts in the performance. Their new album I Am Easy To Find and its partner short film (starring Alicia Vikander and directed by Mike Mills (Beginners, 20th Century Women)) was conceived of and partially recorded during the Sleep Well Beast sessions. While the aesthetic of the new record is certainly consistent with that album’s, its themes move on from Beast’s tension between inner and outer dark forces. I Am Easy To Find is instead a record about our devotion to one another, and the femininity of the presented voices is an effective aesthetic for The National’s most empathetic album to date.

Much of the album sees Berninger singing duets or flat out giving way to the likes of Gail Ann Dorsey, Lisa Hannigan, Kate Stables, and Mina Tindle. Opener “You Had Your Soul With You” starts out familiar enough--glitching electronics, nervous drums and guitar flourishes and flutters, weeping strings, Berninger’s baritone--but the introduction of Dorsey, the type of voice that was previously relegated to background harmonies on National albums, is one of those moments where you’re listening to a longtime band and realize they’re offering something truly different. On “Where Is Her Head”, Berninger shouts like he does on many National tracks on which he’s losing his mind, but his stream of consciousness is here dwarfed by Dorsey in harmony with Eve Owens, them providing the emotional and musical stability that’s usually the job of Bryan Devendorf’s snares. “Dust Swirls In Strange Light” features the Brooklyn Youth Choir and no Berninger. And there are a couple tracks without any words: choral instrumental “Her Father In The Pool” and “Underwater”.

Digging deeper, though, it’s the lyrical approach that’s an even more radical change. Berninger sings again with Dorsey on “Roman Holiday”; “I’ll take away your shame,” they promise to each other. “I’ll come to where you are alone in the quiet light,” he declares on “Quiet Light”. Elsewhere, with Tindle on “Oblivions”, they sing, “It’s almost like you’re not afraid of anything I do”--a far cry from “I was afraid I’d eat your brains.” “Not In Kansas” is a total tribute to women that have changed Berninger’s life. On the title track, Berninger and Stables sing to each other, “There’s a million little battles that I’m never gonna win anyway / I’m still waiting for you every night with ticker tape, ticker tape.” The line (a selfless contrast to “I’m a festival / I’m a parade”) is the ultimate tribute to true love: No matter how much people bicker and fight, unconditional support conquers all. It’s what makes closer “Light Years” so sad. “Oh, the glory of it all was lost on me / ‘Til I saw how hard it’d be to reach you,” Berninger sings. An album ago, he was death obsessed, and now, he can’t stop living, perhaps even afraid to die.

So how would The National adapt I Am Easy To Find to a live stage at a Summerfest closing slot? With backup singers on songs like “You Had Your Soul With You”, “Quiet Light”, “Hey Rosey”, “The Pull Of You”, “Oblivions”, “Where Is Her Head” and the swaying title track. As for old songs, Berninger provided his usual stage antics, air guitaring with the Dessner brothers on “Don’t Swallow the Cap”, trying to toss his drink to someone in the crowd, perhaps drunkenly remarking about the “flying benches” in the sky (the skyride), and, genuinely, telling the crowd how excited he was to see his wife and kid, the sentiment most consistent with the band’s great new record.

Album score: 8.2/10

The other two bands whose full sets I saw at Summerfest had connections to The National. Adia Victoria’s two albums have been recorded by Aaron Dessner. Silences, her 2019 release, like 2016′s Beyond the Bloodhounds, centers around the identity of black women like Victoria herself, but its ambitions delve into the Southern Gothic. From the very start, Victoria modernizes the aesthetic. “Clean”, like Odetta Hartman’s incredible “Misery”, is a gender-inverted murder ballad, the victim God himself. On the less-than-two-minute ditty, Victoria, over plucks of the cello and National-esque glitchy electronics, breathes life into and begins her religion-and-patriarchy-conquering persona continued throughout the album. “I’m gonna do everything in the world that my grandma ever wish she had,” she declares on “Pacolet Road”, the ultimate fuck you to those who use religion, race, sex, or gender to oppress. Furthermore, on “The City”, her sample of Billie Holiday singing “Lady Sings The Blues”, blending in with baroque swipes of strings, pays tribute to another strong black woman in a position of creative power but during a different time frame, one step closer to becoming eternal.

While Victoria totally nails the demonic aspect of Southern Gothic, she frames many of her demons as positive and uses them for leverage over those who disappoint and oppress. “Different Kind Of Love” is an absolute stomp of a breakup song. On “The Needle’s Eye”, over disorienting, swirling electronics, she sings, “The day is done / Let’s have some fun / Beat me like a drum,” her layered vocals repeatedly cooing the last words at the end of the song. Victoria mixes references to habits of self destruction and feelings of desire, both part of her and what makes her fierce. “I like the things that make me hurt,” she sings on the tiptoeing “Devil Is A Lie”. “I like to do things my way / Or I don’t do them at all,” she strongly declares on “Heathen”, continuing, “Cause first they ask you to compromise / And then the next breath demandin’ you crawl.” In other words, it’s not really self destruction; it’s the “same old nice folks bringing me down.”

Silences climaxes in “Dope Queen Blues”, what Victoria calls the “culmination of my ruination”. Flute and piano add weight to Victoria’s ultimate goal: Seek the divine within herself, replace who she did away with on the first song. “I wanna break free from my body / Shaken loose my skin / ‘Cause I had a thought I am a god / Of this I am convinced.” Alone at the top, staring at her reflection, she ends the album singing to her reflection, over an instrumental with wonderfully uneasy synths: “I wanna get lonely with you.” 

When she performed live, Victoria was appropriately in control, dominating the stage during “Clean” and “The Needle’s Eye”, but cementing her story and songs in context with her peers and fellow citizens, dedicating them to black victims of police murders and women who are victims of the patriarchy. Interestingly enough, she lifted lines from Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box” during a song, and it was an oddly fitting choice. Despite what the celebrity back-and-forth will tell you, Kurt Cobain’s original was purportedly inspired by documentaries about children with cancer: “I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black,” he sang. Victoria, who strutted around on stage like an almighty being, could convince you she had such power.

Album score: 7.6/10

Guided By Voices, meanwhile, occupied a strange slot, getting a mid-day 90 minute set as opposed to their usual headlining three-plus hours. Still, they offered 35 songs, a little over a third from albums from this year (Zeppelin Over China and Warp and Woof). “Every song could be first or last,” Robert Pollard observed about the band’s set. These days, the first song tends to be a newer one, the closer Isolation Drills banger “Glad Girls”. It was an abridged, arguably more concise GBV set because it had to be, but it was fun seeing the band essentially open for their Ohio brethren. The words “Towers to the skies / An academy of lies” were sung twice on that stage, because Berninger interpolates them on I Am Easy to Find’s title track, following them up with “You were never much of a New Yorker”. On a day seeing two Ohio bands and a Nashville queen in Wisconsin, New York was the farthest thing on any of our minds.