The National - Sleep Well Beast (Sept. 8th, 2017) Anticipation Thread

listen its ok to give up on a band if <10% of their discography interests you.

Yeah this is a band that I think is very unrated and very prone to stereotyping and inaccurate generalizations. But that being said, they're also very much not everybody's thing. I kinda lost my will to keep saying "no really you should give this a try." It's like, if you listen to Pink Rabbits and it really does nothing for you, then you might as well move on

For me this is a band that's become more valuable over time. Especially as so many indie rock acts (and especially white male indie rock acts) lost their touch over the last half decade, they're one of the few bands from that scene left standing that can still deliver that fix I used to get from these kinds of records. But if you can find that somehow in like a War on Drugs or LCD Soundsystem record, I understand how those would hold a lot more appeal

it's weird, i think this is their most immediately accessible record since probably alligator but that's part of why i don't like it as much as their others, relistens are less rewarding than they've traditionally been, the album is just gets more flat and antisocial the more i engage with it. and i was sort of expecting the opposite as they really swaddle most of these songs in inviting electronic blinks but it oddly makes the songs sound more haphazardly arranged and unfinished

and the reason i like this band is because of the way they play together as a band, even their most fussily arranged arabesques usually have some good drumming, but the closest they come to sounding like a band on the new one is "turtleneck," which sucks, and the best songs seem the most liberated from their interplay ("i'll still destroy you")

the album is just gets more flat and antisocial the more i engage with it.

Yep -- like a cute guy you meet at a friend's apartment party who smiles at your jokes and talks to you about music but becomes obviously bored if not sullen

Dang that sucks so much to hear. Most impressive thing about this band for me had been how replayable their records are.

I like what the National are and represent, but I don't find it bears repetition- not enough to listen to album after album. Which is to say, I get enough from tracks on Sad Songs, Alligator and Boxer to not need any more, because it's only going to be a variation on that Berninger/National theme. I'm now one of those people that go on the internet to talk about things they haven't seen or listened to.

wait, what do they represent?

What I have to flesh out my undercooked ramblings now? Jeez.

Well, Berninger's arc has always seemed a relatively narrow one, tracking 'his' (people like him/me) neuroses as he staggers into middle-age. And for all their credentials, the band are pretty conservative, too. At their best their Robert Lowell in a haunted ballroom; at their most average they're just an empty apartment. And 'Dark Side of the Gym' just signals stuff like 'Bad Neighbours' to me - a movie title which makes watching the actual movie entirely unnecessary.

i fear them turning into coldplay more than u2.

"High Violet is great and the production on the first song is great too, no idea what you are all talking about!"

are you listening to the same mix everyone else is? because it sounds like shit; it's all fuzzy and compressed and transistory and shit sounding. I'm not sure what the intention was but the result is just crappy for such a good song.

"i fear them turning into coldplay more than u2."

to be fair, the thinking dad bod's coldplay.

I love the fact that the two complaints itt is "they're too boring" and "I don't like it when their production is raw"

That song is not raw. It's fucking horrible. Rid Of Me is raw. And awesome sounding.

turtleneck is sick wtf

TBH I think that “Terrible Love” is a great song — in terms of songwriting and rhe actual performance and mood and emotions etc. — but it’s ruined by the mixing. The album version is just a brick of noise; when I heard the alternate one, I was like Yes, finally! It breathes, it’s alive.

I’m actually quite curious why they made these particular production choices for only one track on the album — the remaining High Violet songs are nowhere nearly as compressed; they sound nice and reverb-y. Have they addressed it in interviews?

And OTM with Rid of Me being an example of extremely raw music that doesn’t make your head hurt. But that’s Albini’s touch.

and Polly Jean Harvey's.

always thought "terrible love" was a demo they couldn't replicate the energy of so they just slapped the demo on the record

It's like they wanted some kind of MBV fuzz over it, but just fucked it up.

and Polly Jean Harvey's.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

Of course! Now I realise I made it sound like it was just Albini’s idea or something, but obviously it was Polly’s intention to make such a raw and uncompromising piece of work. And she seems to care very much how her records sound.

Back to the National ― I gave the record only two semi-distracted spins so far, and their albums tend to be growers, so I won’t form any broad statements for now. All I can say it seems less cluttered than Trouble Will Find Me, and I enjoy that spaciousness in the sound. Matt’s lyrics seems somehow more . . . misanthropic. I’m not sure, English is not my first language, so they’ll also need some time to sink in properly. There were some moments where the electronic flourishes made me raise my eyebrows but I need more time.

iirc they adressed the production on HV in interviews around the release, talking about how they'd recorded in a kind of home studio and how that was a liberating process, and after reading that when I listened to the record I was like wtf get back in a real studio!

I think the entire record has poor production (slightly cluttered, claustrophobic, metallic) but Terrible Love takes the cake

I have grown to like the songs though, esp from hearing them live where they work just fine

the Terrible Love demo sounds better but there's still something unfinished or unrealized about the song to my ears

tbqh i remember seeing them open for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (lol) at the Troubadour circa Alligator and thinking "man i feel like I just saw U2"

always thought "terrible love" was a demo they couldn't replicate the energy of so they just slapped the demo on the record

They did an absolutely knockout version of it on Conan a few weeks before they released the studio version. Made the mix that much more perplexing; the song kills live.

as down as i've been about this record "day i die" frickin' rocks

Fuck you, Karl https://t.co/3gXr8DYryw

— The National (@TheNational) September 9, 2017

yeah I don't know what the choices were behind that mix. it's like when Low chose to hard pan the vocals on Drums and Guns. Why on earth would you do this? it is bizarre and wrong.

you grow up comfortable in cincinatti. your parents pay for you to go to oberlin ($$$$$). you're so talented! you record five, six, seven albums? you never had that many ideas to begin with. but you're talented!

Wow, that's bitter.

Yeah, weird.

the pressure's on the national
there's one to go, the same is true
and all this time we couldn't forget you
golden, what's the name
down to the sea

turn up The National
the neighbors are sleeping

Really enjoying this record. Production is just perfect, rich but uncluttered. I like a little slack on National albums, that sense of leisure is a big part of the appeal for me

Really enjoying this record. Production is just perfect, rich but uncluttered. I like a little slack on National albums, that sense of leisure is a big part of the appeal for me

KROQ played "Day I Die" today, not their style of music at all.

Can you all clarify what BESIDES the distorted guitar effect on Terrible Love you find so awful sounding? I haven't listened in awhile but I remember everything else about the song sounding... normal? I have to assume you're taking issue with something more overall about the mix because I wouldn't expect all the National fans on ilx to have adopted say Guitar Magazine's opinions of what is an acceptable approach and what's not for guitar tone. Because the band seems to be going for an intentional deteriorating distortion with elements building around it as it goes. However, on the other hand it is hard to imagine general studio production objectively bad enough to warrant the collective hate here.

distorted guitar in the verse sounds off, as if it's coming from another room and out of sync as well (prob due to intentionally off delay pedal or smth)

no cohesion in the bridge, which is where the song starts to break up - maybe it's the eq'ing and reverb that's off and makes the players sound so isolated (in a dissonant way)

chorus is when the song really self destructs, matt's vocals overprocessed and drums running off to no effect

while the verse is decent, I think the chorus disappoints melodically as well, so even if the alternative mix is better, it's never going to sound great to my ears

Listening to the different mixes side by side (both on the expanded edition of HV on Spotify) the differences are obvious. The 'distorted guitar effect' sounds more like it and all the other instruments were recorded onto old & half disintegrated magnetic tape, and to me it's the vocals that sound like they're coming from another room. I wouldn't say it hurts my ears but the alternative version is obviously an easier listen.

I don't think I want to hear this supposed Karl Rove quote over and over again.

It's difficult to put my finger on as specifically as some here have, but it's just always given me an almost instant headache, in a way that almost nothing else has - not the wildest, most distorted Swans or MBV or Sunn o)))) or anything else I've heard.

the album version of "terrible love" sounds like it takes place underwater, it's especially apparent when "sorrow" starts and you actually hear space and separation in the mix

I wonder if that might meaningfully connect to the lyrics in some way.

I had always imagined the distorted guitar was coming out of this old broken radio with bad frequency sitting on the floor next to the band, and they start building a song around it . I thought they were intentionally going for that kind of effect. Again as far as the rest of the song goes I'll have to give it a proper revisit.

Aaron talks about it in this Pitchfork interview

We had re-recorded "Terrible Love" because we had the opportunity to do it. The original version of "Terrible Love" on the record is my demo, basically. Bryan drummed to it with one mic. And then when we started playing it live, we realized it was this beast of a live song and that it was really fun to play, so one day we recorded it again and it came out pretty well.

Pitchfork: The [new version of "Terrible Love"](http://pitchfork.com/news/40457-video-the-national-terrible-love/ "new version of "Terrible Love"" ) is awesome. When I heard it, I thought it should've been on the album.

AD: I prefer the sort of murky, blurry version that's on the record, just because I like the guitar sound. There's all those accidental harmonies in it that I like, but maybe that's just me being too attached to something because I can't recreate it. That was part of why we used it; we just couldn't make the guitar sound like that again. But live, it is probably the biggest song off High Violet. We end the show with it. It's really intense, and it becomes very unhinged towards the end. When we first played the song, we played it on "Jimmy Fallon" maybe two months before the record came out. So people got attached to that version that they saw on YouTube. Then, when the album came out, I think that's why people were disappointed. It didn't have the same kind of drumming that really kicks in. So we re-recorded it, more for ourselves. We just wanted to see how it would come out, and then it came out really well. It became the version that's been pushed to radio. I'm glad that there's two versions. I still think that the album version is more appropriate to the album, but it's good that there's this more high-fidelity version of it out there.

I have no problem with the general direction of that guitar sound. I just wish they had recorded everything better. As Brad says, there's very little space or separation in the mix. The drums at 1:45 should kill, and they just blend into everything because everything else sounds like it's embedded into the-wall-of-bad-sound guitar, which isn't doing anything that is more interesting than the song as a whole. Anyway, I get that there may be higher order reasons why the muddy recording is favored by some.

It seems like they were attached to the harmonics and droning of the original guitar sound, but then that track occupied the whole spectrum. They kind of recreated the feel of the guitar sound in the alternate by adding droning strings to a cleaner, tremolo guitar. It has a similar feel but leaves room for the song to grow and allows some separation between instruments and parts.

You can also do things to make a single insane guitar sound good in the mix, but you might need something better than a demo-quality recording.

Kevin Shields on Loomer guitar sound: "It's definitely one of the few stereo guitar tracks. There's no effect on that one, it's basically just the straight guitar sound. It sounds unusual because it was a Strat neck and a Jaguar body with EMG pickups in it. It was just a weird monstrous thing. It had a slightly harder, more midrange-y than a Jaguar/Jazzmaster. It's a lot more high frequency, strange sound. We used partly the sound of the guitar plugged straight into the desk and mixed in slightly and that's got something going on in the high end. But when we mixed it, what gives it a lot of its sound is that it's so heavily compressed with the drums that it sounds like a train. In fact, that was the sound we were trying to get at, like it sounds like you're on a train or something."

It sounds like they were working with 3 tracks, one of which was much brighter, to make that work.

I suppose it's probably 2 tracks: one the insane low-mid-rangey, sounds-like-a-train and blends with the drums and the other the brighter straight-into-the-desk track that could be an entirely different instrument.

to complete my five postagraph essay, i'll note that falling in love with a worse demo is a pretty human and forgivable thing. most of ilx did this with grimes' realiti after all.

i mean it's sorta like "turtleneck" on the new record, i get the thought process behind the decision to include it i just extremely disagree with it