THE NATIONAL

TROUBLE WILL FIND ME (4AD)

18/20

The arrangements replete on The National’s sixth album are masterfully accomplished and, in terms of pure composition, as good as anything they’ve ever produced; and by extension, as good as anything in modern popular music. Tonally this album has much in common with 2010’s High Violet. Their previous five full- lengths have been a constant progression, a patient pursuit of a fully-formed identity. It’s stirring to hear them arrive at a common destination and focus on fully honing it. Vocalist Matt Berninger puts on a remarkable showing throughout. He dominates these boundlessly expanding tracks, his thematic blurring of the personal and the metaphysical at its most engrossing, elevating curiously relatable facets of the human condition to unreachably grandiose heights. Murmurs such as “You should know me better than that” on opener I Should Live In Salt, or the heart-wrenching pathos of masculine fragility admission I Need My Girl become smothering, swollen with contexts yet inviting interpretation. Very little is left tacit or unsaid, Berninger narrates the listener through each propulsive rhythm and rich surge, the two sets of twins behind constantly serving him, and he them. Trouble Will Find Me is a nourishing, generous and nigh on flawless album.

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Words: Geraint Davies