Add guitars that strangely evoke double time country-style picking and Cure-style bass, and I can’t for the life of me see how it could be called “uninspiring” and “supremely unlikeable”. His style is more akin to a jazz drummer’s finesse. Not just content to stay in the pocket, Devendorf establishes the beat and then further explores the tonalities of the drums as an instrument in a manner that is sorely lacking in most rock music. Drummer Bryan Devendorf is key to these shifts, and is one of the most musical drummers I’ve heard in some time. The band excels at establishing a mood and then playing within the dynamics of the song to keep things constantly moving and fresh. Musically, there’s a mix and match approach to much of Alligator that works quite well. Whether you feel it has merit or not, it’s still genuine. They’re merely commenting on things as they see them. I don’t subscribe to the point of view that rock lyricists should be elevated to literary heights, and I don’t think we should be expecting them to be John Steinbeck, or to somehow give us all the meaning of life. Where it’s random, and it’s common versus common. This is nothing like it was in my room, in my best clothes, thinking of you. How can anybody know, how they got to be this way?Įverything I can remember, I remember wrong. You were right about the end it didn’t make a difference. There are lyrical gems in most of the songs, and overall Berninger writes unpretentiously and delivers his lyrics convincingly and with a slightly Dadaist twist: It seems to me that this was an overly-harsh assessment of Berninger’s words, which were taken and used completely out of context. Jon’s beef seemed to be more with singer Matt Berninger’s lyrics than with anything else, which he described as “repellent, useless, and ridiculous.” That’s a tad unfair, really. I wasn’t blown away by it initially, yet after spending the better part of the week with it, I found it to be an excellent batch of melodic, well-executed songs with a lot of subtext lurking just beneath the surface. I came across Alligator on Emusic and downloaded the album a few days before Jon’s review appeared. I should say that I don’t own any of the National’s previous albums, nor have I even been aware of their very existence until fairly recently. While I respect Jon’s opinion, I couldn’t have disagreed more with his review, no matter how entertaining or well-written it may have been, and felt that he was unduly dismissive of a band that, in my opinion, deserved to be shown a lot more respect. Jon Langmead’s recent review of the National’s Alligator here on PopMatters a little over a week ago was a bit controversial among our writers.
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