The National: Sleep Well Beast

Week 13

THE PITCH

This is very different from my first suggestion, but I’m trying to build on what you’ve liked so far and push you in a different direction. It’s more acoustic with really fun twinkly pianos and crunchy guitar lines and more orchestral stuff on some tracks. There’s also weird stuff in there that I’d love to see how they do live, some synthy stuff and bits of spoken word. It feels really intimate and sounds good on headphones.

Another reason I picked this is because of the lyrical content – I find the National’s lyrics really interesting, in a playful and melancholy way, which sounds like an oxymoron, but then you hear stuff like “I’m always mothering myself to bits” from Walk It Back and you see what I mean. When thinking of albums to suggest to you, I find myself reaching for songs in which ‘storytelling’ is a big feature, as a kind of hook for you to connect to it, but then I remember your love for Vampire Weekend, which certainly leans away from direct or obvious stories and more into wordplay and mood-setting. The National’s lyrics feel much more about a mood or a feeling than any kind of narrative. If you’ll pardon me sounding ridiculously Gen Z – they’re ‘vibey’. But there’s stuff to get your teeth into here – political (Walk It Back is a good example here too), but personal too. I think it speaks to growing old and adult relationships in really interesting ways. Don’t let this put you off, but I find it tickles me in the same way as good poetry, there’s enough mood-setting and lyrical density to let you interpret without hitting you over the head with any specific story/meaning. (Maybe next year you’ll force yourself to read poetry!) They create a little world that you just get to inhabit and explore.

And Matt Berninger has a great voice obviously, deep and kind of hoarse in a way that I find scratches my brain in a satisfying way.

Livia Nicholson

P.S. This is also my backdoor Taylor Swift suggestion. If you end up liking the National, you have to listen to Coney Island, their song with Taylor Swift!

MY RESPONSE

So far this year when I’ve sat down to write I’ve started with a load of notes I’ve taken over the week, rabbit holes I’ve gone down. This week though, I’ve scarcely had time to listen to the album, let alone stop and take notes or even give it much thought, and no time at all to listen to anything beyond the album I’ve committed to. We’ve been away in London and I’ve squeezed listening in around museums and shows and walking and talking, first thing in the morning, before I went to sleep, while I was waiting for people and once when I was early to meet someone and I walked around a bit of London that used to be grimily familiar and now seems glossy and alien. I think that latter was the perfect experience of Sleep Well Beast – as you say, Liv, mood is all here and there is a melancholy and a nostalgic feel that make a perfect soundtrack for wandering through your own past.

With a lot of the albums I’ve listened to this year, it’s taken me the best part of the week to decide how I feel about them but with Sleep Well Beast I knew immediately that this was a YES from me, for all the reasons you state: the mood, his voice, growly or soft, the twinkly gentle stuff, the thrashy bits that always seem ‘earned.’ My fave here is Day I Die, and I also love Turtleneck (quite different in tone and sound from those melancholy, quiet tracks) and the train rhythm of Empire Line and Walk It Back with its weird spoken part. I find a good deal of whatever MB is singing about is passing me by but he has some lovely sticky word combinations ‘teakettle love’, ‘anonymous castrati’, the satisfying sibilance of ‘I’ll still destroy you someday, sleep well beast, you as well, beast’.

Most weeks I’ve tried to listen to the albums in different ways but this week I’ve listened entirely with noise-cancelling headphones. For this particular album that worked out well because the directness and intenseness of the headphones is perfect for listening to the album’s intimate, moody tone and hearing the layered nuance of the music. It’s taken me a long time to come round to headphones. I used to find the experience of the disembodied sound inside your head unsettling and I didn’t like the feel of things in my ears and not being able to hear what was around me. I would play podcasts aloud from my phone when I walked or ran in the country and reluctantly resort to headphones only when I was in places where other people were around. But then first I got bone-conducting headphones which don’t go in your ears and allow you to hear what’s going on around you and they were a revelation (though it takes a while to get used to the tickly sensation). I mostly use those when I’m out now. I got the noise-cancelling ones specifically to do this project and I’m entirely won round to them for comfort and for getting the best listening experience. And I guess I’m over disembodied sound being a problem – it’s hard to imagine how I ever found it weird.

WHAT ELSE I LISTENED TO THIS WEEK

Pretty much nothing