The National – Live @ Pitchfork

August 3, 2009

Brooklyn quintet The National has been picking up steam at a steady pace since I first saw them play a daytime set at the 2006 Pitchfork Festival, and I can’t say I was the least bit surprised to learn that they’d been bestowed the honor to close out the Saturday festivities this year. Their aptitude at cross-pollinating driving post-punk rhythms with dense orchestral arrangements has earned the band universal acclaim for their two most recent albums Alligator and Boxer, but their notoriously frenetic live reinterpretation of this unique brand of chamber rock is what really brought the crowd that night.

 Like any great live band, The National is known for their mastery of the quiet/loud dyanmic that compels people to get out of their lawn chairs and in to the crowd. After lurching forward with the slow build of a new track called “Runaway” and the classic opener “Start A War”, the discordant chiming that starts off “Mistaken For Strangers” felt like the real payoff for the couple hundred loyalists that were eagerly crammed between the stage and the sound booth, possibly in hopes of getting close enough to smell the Dewars and discontent on singer Matt Berningers breath.

For all of the subdued fury that Berninger gave off throughout the evening, it’s clear that the bands real secret weapon is drummer Bryan Devendorf. While the syncopated floor tom rolls of “Squalor Victoria” undoubtedly grabbed the attention of the crowd in the proverbial cheap seats, it was the thundering snares and unhinged lyrical tirade at the beginning “Abel” that explained why myself and hundreds of people I’ve never met were shoving each other every which way for no discernible reason.
 

 As shown later on during “Apartment Story” and “Green Gloves”, The National can do “mellow”, even if their definition of mellow includes rhythmic cues that wouldn’t be out of place on a Gang of Four record. As much as the crowd appreciated the tender moments of the evening, you’d be hard-pressed to find better footage of a seething mass of twenty-somethings screaming their lungs out in unison than when they closed their main set with “Mr. November”.  While this song may or may not be about being a clutch football hero, a memory that couldn’t have been relevant to more than 1% of the congregation that evening, it’s hard to not feel a fleeting moment of importance while yelling “I won’t f**k us over!” with a neighboring gang of bros you’ve known for less than an hour.

And then they came back on stage and brought it down with “About Today”, a lilting ode to hopelessness driven by a cloud of reverb-drenched guitars and violin stabs that manages to make everything feel OK in spite of itself. And therein lies the essence of what makes The National truly great: it may not sound like it or feel like it, but they want you to know that everything isn’t as f**ked as it seems. We’ll be fine.

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Live Review by Pete Cottell. Follow Pete on Twitter.

Follow the jump for more The National pictures. Click here to see the full set.

Posted by Pete in Festival, Live