It has been several years since I was first impressed by The National when they played at the Explosions In The Sky ATP Festival in 2008 and I’ve been keen to see them live again since. They don’t play lots of gigs in the UK and this event, one of two sold-out nights at Alexandra Palace, is part of a very small UK tour. I didn’t manage to grab tickets to their Roundhouse gig in June so I was pretty excited about seeing the band play some of the best music of the last decade live on stage.
The band seem a little bit nervous, and the cavernous venue and huge crowd must be pretty overwhelming to a band who are far from a household name despite their considerable success. Singer Matt Berninger is a little difficult to watch as he paces like a caged lion between each song and there is next to no audience interaction. When the music starts it is a different story and the songs, drawing heavily from this year’s release Trouble Will Find Me, sound great.
They are a band who are impressive on record, but pretty much every element of the sound works that little bit better in the live arena. The central five-piece are augmented by their usual live band expansion adding keyboards and trombone and on lots of the songs tonight a string quartet adds an extra dimension enabling them to be closer to the album arrangements.
As the set progresses, taking in fan favourites from Alligator, The Boxer and High Violet, the band relax and we get more chat, audience interaction and a few anecdotes from the band. They get an enthusiastic and warm response throughout the set and this clearly settles the butterflies in their stomachs as the gig goes on.
The core of this band is a near-perfect set-up. The Dessner twins holding their guitars in the air in unison, the Devendorf brothers laying down complex beat perfect rhythms and Berninger lurching between baritone croon and basnshee wail to great effect. Drummer Bryan Devendorf in particular is a revelation and the sound he produces is a hypnotic backbone to the songs. ‘Graceless’ from their recent album is one of my least favourite of their songs, not helped by the ubiquity on 6 Music, but the way the drums and bass drive it live makes me reconsider my opinion.
The song choices are not all perfect, I would have taken the incendiary ‘Abel’ over a version of their underwhelming contribution to the Hunger Games 2 soundtrack, but in the most part the song choices are just what I’d hoped before the evening began. And any set of songs that includes the brilliant ‘Mr November’ as part of the encore is a good one.
By Dorian Rogers
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