Following 2017’s stellar Sleep Well Beast and surrounding world tours, no one would have begrudged the gents of The National a well-earned break. Beyond that, there was something distinctly final about that record that felt like a resolution of some kind. Understated and refined, there was a sense that the haunted and middle-aged weariness always present in the band’s music was finally reflected in earnest in the members’ lives and, as such, a sense that it was the album they’d always been trying to make. Unbeknownst to most, however, rather than basking in the wake of achievement, the Cincinnati quintet spent the aftermath of Sleep Well Beast already in the process of their next project – and their most ambitious to date at that.
I Am Easy to Find was born from director Mike Mills contacting the band about collaborating on some sort of project and the band, fans of Mills’ work, agreed. Indeed far from simple collaboration, the band essentially handed the keys of their music over to Mills as he directed and produced a heartachingly beautiful short film of the same name starring Alicia Vikander and, ultimately, produced the album that would accompany it. Not necessarily needing one another, Mills instead calls the two projects, “playfully hostile siblings that love to steal from each other”. The National provided the songs for both – some new, some that didn’t make it onto Sleep Well Beast and others that date back years – and Mills assembled them how he saw fit. “Featherless ideas that we would hand back and forth to each other and people would put some feathers in it,” as frontman Matt Berninger puts it. The result is the only way one could see The National really progressing. Following what felt like mastery of what they do as themselves and what they can give, I Am Easy to Find looks outwards, opening the doors to what can be given back to them.
The first moments of the record certainly don’t feel particularly new. “You Had Your Soul With You” opens with a jittery distorted guitar line and pounding drums, Berninger’s distinctive baritone churning out an immediately memorable and characteristic sardonic hook, “you had your soul with you, I was in no mood.” But it’s about halfway through the track, when the so very National surge of guitars and drums fades out and the lone voice of legendary singer and Bowie bandmate Gail Ann Dorsey breaks through that you realize what this record is about. For so long The National were inextricably bound to Berninger’s voice, almost elevated by their reliance on it even as it became the divisive factor of whether you liked their music or not. Here they find him willing to take a back seat, Dorsey one of many female vocalists who are a constant presence throughout the record, sometimes accompanying his doleful tones while at others drowning him out on almost every track. To say it works would be an understatement of the highest order, the music caught in the updraft of recognizing that it more than stands up without needing Berninger as the star – both vocally and lyrically.
It’s a step Berninger embraces. While he would often write with his wife Carin, lyrics that masterfully capture the heartbreak and despair within the minutiae of life and relationship, here we are treated to true dialogue between voices. At times true romance shines through the uncertainty and fear as in ‘Hey Rosey’. Dorsey and Berninger trade blows, “I will love you like there’s razors in it,” she croons before Berninger belts back, “there’s never really ever any safety in it.” ‘Where Is Her Head’ sees him and Eve Owen dovetailing beautifully through the most grandiose chorus of the album, its unbridled energy just about falling the right side of kitsch thanks to the refinement of the Dessner effect. Meanwhile, ‘Oblivions’ contains some of the record’s most beautiful moments in its soft and unhurried unfolding. French singer Mina Tindle’s delicately descending chorus embracing and offsetting the steady pulse as she wrestles with Berninger and his fear of what it means to endure in love, “It’s the way you say yes when I ask you to marry me, you don’t know what you’re doing do you think you can carry me?”; sentiments that can be blown apart with a simple shattering admission, “if nothing scares you about me and you, never put me down, oh my life is made up of nothing now.”
Elsewhere Lisa Hannigan completely steals ‘So Far So Fast’, the stuttering momentum and electronics feeling the closest to much of what Sleep Well Beast did well, before returning again on ‘Hairpin Turns’ where the lessons of ‘About Today’ and ‘Guilty Party’ remain unlearned. “What are we going through? Wait and see, days of brutalism and hairpin turns,” her and Berninger harmonize – words that feel like the only ones left in an ongoing struggle as they’re left “always arguing about the same things”. Words seem to tumble out of Berninger more than they ever did, with ‘Quiet Light’ throwing rhyme or pattern out the window for simple professions of, “it’s nothing to do with us, I’m just so tired of thinking about everything.” It’s never more realized than in the gorgeous sorrow of ‘Not in Kansas’, where a cracked-up Berninger elevates his usual struggles with tedium into larger ideas of identity and what it means to be human over a steadily repeated guitar line. Memories and anecdotes pour out of him as he candidly recalls everything from losing his Christianity to his father cracking his spine ice skating to listening to REM’s ‘Begin the Begin’ over and over. Fear and uncertainty are laid out with true emotion, barely veiled politics professed with “a child at the border, you can’t ignore us”, even as he sings of leaving home and fearing he “won’t have the balls to punch a Nazi”; the following “father what is wrong with me?” both personal and universal, almost reverent.
But the narratives that play out are reflective of something grander at work here, the ever-maturing refinement of the band’s music is truly what stands out. Where once they relied on builds with big payouts, the soundscapes conjured on I Am Easy to Find harness restraint so effectively, instead of reveling in the melodies that champion the vocal riches over the intricate layering of guitars, Bryan Devendorf’s iconic rhythms and the space between everything. Even at 64 minutes, it’s a record that never feels bloated. It may be in part due to the influence of Mills at the center of production, a new creative driver to the process, but take nothing away from the songwriting. A band who with every new work feels almost effortlessly head and shoulders above their contemporaries, it’s easy to wonder how The National manage to keep doing it as they the world’s truly important bands. But perhaps the mystery isn’t so deep. On I Am Easy to Find they lay themselves bare, recognize their vulnerabilities and let others in to walk with them on the journey. “The doors have been wide open for people coming in,” Berninger says of The National, “it’s a big community. If they were wonderful before, well they’re all the more better for it.
