I’m making a prediction that Alligator, last’s year’s gorgeous album by newbie-famous-Indies The National, will hit classic status by the time I turn 35. I’m not trying to speak for you, so get off my back. Maybe you won’t still be listening to it in fifteen years. I’m just saying that this album’s a grower. It gets better and better with every spin. And if given enough of a chance, it can grow to be a huge part of Indie rock culture, an album we all remember as we age gracefully and start to reminisce about our twenties and the “great times” we had watching the Indie scene explode. “Remember Alligator?” “Oh yea, dude, it was like, a sign. “Yea, man. Like a glimmer of hope for the future of our, like, music.”It could happen. It could! Let me explain, because maybe not everyone had crazy hippies for parents who would crack out the 33s and school them on the classics of their generation.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about growers. Over the summer this year, like every year, I kind of returned apologetcially to my older music, putting aside all the love-at-first-site Spring releases that temporarily caught my wandering musical eye, and came back to the sounds that have stuck with me on the long term. Some of these albums have been a part of my family, Deja Vu by CSNY was one of my mom’s favorites and my dad and I used to listen to Revolver at dinner every week, so they have become the permanent soundtrack to some of my happiest childhood memories.
But this music has more than just nostalgic significance. No matter how it had been introduced, it would still be with me twenty years later, just like it has been for countless other people who love Revolver or, say, Pet Sounds. For comparison, The Archies made music that has purely nostalgic meaning. That shit is not a grower, it’s good, I like it, but the older I get, the more I just realize that it was just catchy, even kitschy, not classic.
So then what makes a grower? What’s the criteria for music to fill in order for it to hang on despite the changing styles and politics and ages of it’s listeners? I think it’s simply this: growers are albums whose lyrics and sounds are equally important, dissectable, and withholding, so that you something different and new each time.
It’s for the same reason that a person can be fascinating to you, when every year you know them, you learn more about them, but you know there are things about them you will never know or understand. If you want to have a long-term relationship with your music, it’s got to be more than just attractive. It has to be smart and ambitious, spontaneous, and sometimes surprise you with something it knows you like when you’ve had a rough day at work. When an album can provide something that you lack, know things you didn’t, can explain a feeling perfectly that you have, it becomes like a great love.
On first listen, growers may not sound perfect. They might ignore you the first time you meet. You have to earn the trust of a truly great album before it lets you in on it’s deepest secrets. If you didn’t earn it just would not be as fucking good. Nobody wants a slutty album. At least not for more than one party.
So with all of that being said, I’m calling it in the air. I will love the National for life. My turntable and I are willing to commit for the long term to Alligator. As long as we don’t have to be monogamous, that is.
There is a strong significance in the difference between the songs on Alligator that are sung by one person vs. the songs that are sung in unison like Friend of Mine when the two mahogany baritone voices give more of a loneliness in a crowded room vibe. You can feel the empty spaces between them, even though the are together on the same note.
The songs sung alone are the warm opposites of the chilly, brisk duets. Tracks such as Karen have the feel of sitting down to have an all night conversation with a lover. Regardless of tempo they are intimate and dark, escalating at moments of happy excitement, and in moments of impassioned hurt.
Alligator contains the best and worst moments of raw and wild emotion in a desperate synergy between its conflicting monotony and rabid dynamics. High notes on guitar sparkle like a magic trick giving the listener a sense of child-like wonder while the beautiful sound is overlaid with gritty, sorrowful urban prose. The same powerful military drum beat crashes under every track creating a backbone for the album as a whole, stringing the songs together like a diamond necklace on steel cable, precious and unbreakable.
Alligator’s confessions, such as the admission of self involvement in Secret Meeting:
“I’m sorry I missed you, I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain,”
are coupled with mysteries like the sporadic presence of Karen, a woman whose relationship with the singer never comes to light. The National craft a web of confusion and questioning:
“How can anybody know how they got to be this way?”
woven into sage experience:
“Baby we’ll be fine, all we’ve gotta do is be brave and be kind”
“Take all your reasons, take ‘em away to the middle of nowhere and on your way home, throw from you window your
record collection. And they all run together and they never make sense. But that’s how we like it and that’s what we want, something to cry for and something to hunt.”
It’s partly mixture of fuck you-confidence with vulnerable apologies that makes Alligator tangible and real. When, on Baby, We’ll Be Fine, the two twangy guitars move in opposing directions, one up and one down, both accentuated by the vocals which grow from a deep, comforting, growly, bass, to an apologetic tenor, mixing with swirly strings you feel the cockiness of the narrator. As the swelled accompaniment dissipates, the voice cracks on the last “I’m so sorry…?, left alone with just the high twanging guitar, abandoning the listener who is then as confused and broken as the singer himself.
Alligator can take you from childhood to old age, nievete to dissilusionment and acceptence in thirteen tracks.
From The Geese of Beverly Road with its beautiful bright images of created by Gershwin-esque clarinets, oboes, and bassoons, almost like the melody to a Debussy tune to the current under verse on City Middle that’s frantic like a speeding river or cars on a highway at night. Steady, forward movement but you’re not in control over course and direction.
And all I heard the first time I listened was a guy with a nice voice and a bunch of songs that all sounded the same.Good thing I listened again.
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