May 2023 - Music

First Two Pages of Frankenstein - The National 

The National’s ninth album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, is consumed with keeping track: where things diverged, where things were lost, what has been accumulated since. The band is taking stock—sometimes literally. “Eucalyptus” is a breakup anthem in which Matt Berninger spreads out their shared personal effects, pausing every so often to expand the negotiations. (“What about the ornaments? What if I reinvented again?”) During the chorus he makes an offer that is insistently, suspiciously generous: “You should take it/If I miss it, I’ll visit.” The negative accounting continues on the exhausted “Ice Machines,” as Berninger lists everything he can do without (speaker systems, blinking white lights, being perceived). Bryan Devendorf’s drumming is particularly deft, almost sheepishly reticent.

That sort of light touch brushes nearly everything here: In both form and content, this is the National’s gentlest album to date. They’ve been on this trajectory for some time, but Frankenstein goes even further: shedding the prickle and urgency of 2017’s Sleep Well Beast, dropping the conceptual framework of 2019’s artfully orchestrated I Am Easy to Find. Like the latter, Frankenstein has a topflight guest list: Sufjan Stevens, Phoebe Bridgers, Taylor Swift. But only Swift contributes anything beyond vocal coloration. Everyone has their moments—particularly Bridgers, whose harmonies elevate the stately chamber-rock ballad “This Isn’t Helping”—but their presence feels a bit like moral support.

Not to dismiss the power of moral support. It supercharges the hipster reverie “New Order T-Shirt,” which runs sunny fingerpicking under its precise memories: a pack of blue American Spirits on a Russian restaurant table in August 2001, a “Japanese novelty bomb” and the ensuing customs incident. Closing lullaby “Send for Me” is an airy, tender gesture: a ballad that plays like their “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own” or “Fix You.” “If you’re ever sitting at the airport/And you don’t wanna leave,” Berninger dreamily mumbles, “Don’t even know what you’re there for/Send for me.” Still, the project of the National fundamentally differs from that of U2 or Coldplay: Berninger doesn’t offer hope or wholeness, just a simple ride home.

At this point in the National’s career, every sound and lyric perches on the edge of evaporation. They dangle the fantasy of escape but settle for the perpetual transit from city to city, room to room, poolside to poolside. And during all this travel come the nagging questions. “But would your life be so bad/If you knew every single thought I had?” a wounded Berninger asks on “This Isn’t Helping.” There’s an answer, perhaps, on the fidgety doomscroll lament “Tropic Morning News.” “Oh, where’s the brain we shared?” Berninger wonders as he glances up from his phone, mainlining everyone else’s unending urgencies. He admits that staying current can be a kind of stasis: an endless mechanical tapping mirrored by Devendorf’s clipped percussion pad.

Midway through Frankenstein, Taylor Swift hops in, returning the favor of the National’s credited feature on 2020’s Aaron Dessner-produced Evermore. Like “Coney Island,” ”The Alcott” is a true duet, a waltz-time two-hander between estranged mopes condemned to mutual attraction. A subliminal industrial rapping girds the track; Berninger sounds like he’s running lines on a friend’s screenplay. The text, writerly and assured, hums with Swift’s energy: The result is the National (Taylor’s version). The mess is there, just not the chaos.

The chaos comes on the very next track, “Grease in Your Hair,” one of a couple songs that performs the National’s old sleight of hand: working the anxiety around until they pull an anthem out of thin air. As a way to address one of the primary tensions in their catalog—writing songs about dissatisfaction in spite of great conventional success—it’s a great bit. But as Frankenstein moves from wrestling to reckoning, the swells are tamer. “Grease” is rollicking enough, but it crests on wan resignation: “You were so funny then/And I kept thinking I would catch it.” On the pittering-in-place “Alien,” Berninger keeps interrupting his fumbling devotion (“I can be your nurse or something”) to have a breakdown, out of earshot. That kind of emotional withdrawal happens all over the album, and though Aaron and Bryce Dessner carefully daub their compositions with pealing guitars and a full string complement, it has the effect of filling a canyon with mist.

The band has been candid about Berninger’s year-long writer’s block—with depression acting as a force multiplier—that sidelined the singer at the end of a fertile period for both the National and his solo endeavors. (In interviews, the notorious live raconteur has also spoken about quitting alcohol.) By all accounts, his bandmates and family gave him the time and support necessary to recapture his voice. Some of that support surfaces on the record: When Berninger sings, “Your mind is not your friend,” he’s repeating something Carin Besser, his wife and frequent co-writer, told him. First Two Pages of Frankenstein isn’t a portrait of triumph—that would be too easy. Instead, it’s a depiction of someone made unsteady from their time away, but nonetheless desperate to connect: less with an entire arena than someone in the passenger seat.