Sometimes an album becomes a time in the listener’s life. Its notes, its tone, and its lyrics become indistinguishable from that time’s hopes, fears, and epiphanies. The National’s Boxer and the Fall of 2007 are such an album and time for me. So as the temperature begins to drop and cool scented breezes begin to stir in the sweet sunny South, I thought it appropriate to revisit with a (somewhat) critical eye this album that inhabits the memories of a wonderful time in my life.
In short, I see Boxer as a late night album concerning the early evening. The songs, cosmetically identifiable as mellow or calm, immediately lend themselves to quiet late night listening, but they also hold an urgency and subtle excitement , embodied in various forms from a nervous piano riff to post punky guitar crunching. The characters in the lyrics are often in the midst of preparation to leave for some unknown but happy event, portrayed for example in “Apartment Story” in which a partner is implored, “can you hold my drink I’ve got everything else / I can tie my tie all by myself.” Not all the songs have early evening settings, however. In one of my favorite tracks on the album, “Slow Show”, the main character actually seems to be trying to extricate himself from a social outing of some sort, so he can rush home to his partner and enjoy the kind of relaxing intimacy the couples in the early evening songs enjoy (I want to hurry home to you / put on a slow, dumb show for you / and crack you up).
Stylistically instrument-wise, The National has a post-Nick Cave sleepy alt-country thing going on. Sufjan Stevens sits in on the piano, bringing an incredible levity, and the bass and drums do their part to keep the low end full and the listener’s emotions a flutter. Earlier I described the guitars as post-punky, and of course that means you are going to find some reviewer somewhere who says at least one of their songs “sounds like Joy Division!” In this case the song is “Mistaken for Strangers”, and the review came from my beloved allmusic.com. Well “Mistaken For Strangers” doesn’t sound anything like Joy Division. And neither does Interpol! In fact Interpol sounds more like awful. We can’t talk about The National without mentioning singer Matt Berninger’s vocals. They impart a rich, smokey grace, like your cousin’s laughing cigar smoke coming from the other side of the porch on a chilly Thanksgiving evening. His baritone becomes all the more attention grabbing when it does decide to hit a slightly higher register, like in “Apartment Story” when he sings a line that has firmly cemented itself amongst my favorites: “Tired and wired we ruin to easy.”
That lyric, which so absolutely perfectly and simply embodies the human condition, brings me to what I feel is an overriding theme in Boxer, whether it be the artist’s intent or my own head’s creation: each song imparts a serious longing for a time in the past that maybe in reality wasn’t as sweet as we remember it, yet we long anyway. And this longing is strongly mated with an uncharacteristic ferocity of passionate desire for action in the here and now. Unfortunately, this desire for action often leads to disappointment, like when we are trying to recreate this happy time in our lives, beating our heads against the walls to again feel a (perhaps) never felt feeling that has been distorted by the passage of time. Which makes it all the more funny that I cherish this album for the happy place it has in my memory.
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