Yahoo! Music Review

Released on 21/05/07
Label: Beggars Banquet

The National enjoyed a commercial and artistic breakthrough with previous album "Alligator". Yet like Lambchop, after "Nixon" brought them to the brink of mainstream success, the Brooklyn-based childhood friends have opted, with this their fourth album, not to dumb down for dollars. "Boxer" will still grab the lapels of supporters yet is wilfully complex, literate and experimental enough to keep them safely hidden in rock's undergrowth.

Opening track "Fake Empire" seems to allude to this secret, bucolic spot outside the mainstream, talking of making apple pie and spiking lemonade for the journey, before they "tip-toe through our shiny city with our diamond slippers on". Similarly, the pummelling "Mistaken For Strangers" seemingly attacks the way stardom removes you from your friends. This is a band not remotely attracted to the idea of headlining Fuji Rock or dating Renee Zellweger. As a result, "Boxer" rewards from the first carefully-considered bar.

Songs seem to have been constructed on graph paper: the pulse-like staccato drumming of band lynchpin Bryan Devendorf forms the foundations, with the help of piano arpeggios and runs (courtesy of Sufjan Stevens), which are then fleshed out with well-judged, modernist orchestrations (hark at those Steve Reich-y horns) arranged by Australian composer Padma Newsome. Atop it all, Matt Berninger's distinctively bassy, lazy voice, which sounds like a cross between Kurt Wagner and Furniture's Jim Irvin and contains just a hint of stalker menace ("I think I'd better follow you around" - "Brainy").

It gathers momentum slowly, making for a brew so quietly potent and pulsating with repressed energy you're almost afraid to leave the room while it's playing in case it explodes messily all over the walls - consider the trembling tension of "Start A War", in which Berninger tries to deflect a massive row with a tetchy lover ("You were always weird / But I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now") over a backing of one note-bass and racing military drums.

The entire tracklist glitters with neat and intriguing tableaux that hint at the romantic and mildly surrealist adventures taking place in Berninger's head: "In the guest room where we throw money at each other" ("Guest Room"); "I stand inside an empty tuxedo with grapes in my mouth" ("Ada"); "Be still for a second while I try to pin your flowers on" ("Apartment Story"). "Boxer" may not deliver many left hooks or uppercuts - it's a stealthier kind of creature than that. Floats like a U-boat, stings like a nettle.

    by Anna Britten