Continued from part I.

Sleep Well Beast (2017)
Boxer, High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me appeared within a six-year period which, interestingly, coincided almost perfectly with Barrack Obama’s eight-year presidency. In fact, there is something Obamian about peak National – good-natured, low-key, witty, with a tendency to neurotic, middle-class over-analysis and self-doubt. However, a full four years separates Trouble Will Find Me and Sleep Well Beast. By 2017, the apparent utopia of the Obama administration had very much been consigned to the past; Donald Trump was in the White House, Britain had left the European Union, populism was on the rise; a new era had dawned. My opinion is that the National have never really belonged in this new world, as Sleep Well Beast first indicated. The album has its moments; the brooding, tentative opener “Nobody Else Will Be There”; the exasperated lead single “Day I Die”, which reinjects some of the vigour and levity that largely deserted them after Boxer: and the crushing “Guilty Party”, a lament to a failing marriage. But the album doesn’t have much else going for it. There’s a clear Radiohead influence in the icy synths and electronic drumbeats but, in my view, it doesn’t suit them, while the once intriguing obliqueness of the free associative lyrics now serves only to frustrate, a tired rehashing of the usual themes of alcohol, self-loathing, and co-dependence. The world had moved on and the act is starting to wear thin.
* *
Standout track: “Day I Die”

I Am Easy to Find (2019)
If the first third of the National’s existence as a band saw them finding their feet and signature sound, and the second third comprised their Obama-era ‘imperial phase’, then the latter, as-yet unfinished epilogue to their career has entailed a slow, regrettable decline into boring, anodyne, and at times almost risible self-parody. Sleep Well Beast was just about salvageable because of a handful of standout tracks. I Am Easy To Find attempts the same trick in its closing minutes, with the thunderous “Rylan” and the haunting, graceful “Light Years” – one of their finest moments. But even these highlights cannot save this insipid record. The National have always had a tendency toward slightly monotone subduedness, but this was usually forgivable, because their records were slow burners, revealing their magnetism only with sustained listening. I Am Easy To Find is not a slow burner, though – it is simply boring as all hell. An interminable succession of tuneless, indistinguishable, minimalistic piano songs set to pulse-stilling, sub-Kid A-esque electronic drumbeats, topped off by the occasional unremarkable guest vocalist – including, on a few rather toe-curling occasions, Berninger’s wife. Actually, her input here improves the lyrics, which are more coherent than on the maddeningly nebulous Sleep Well Beast, but the overall impression is of an unfortunate, self-indulgent ‘experimentalism’ combined with an alarming poverty of ideas. The fact that they stretched it to sixteen songs is borderline sadistic.
*
Standout track: “Light Years”

First Two Pages of Frankenstein (2023)
I immediately feared the worst when I heard the first seconds of “Once Upon a Poolside”, the opening song on First Two Pages of Frankenstein. A flashback-inducing extension of the insidious formula of I Am Easy To Find appeared to be on the cards – bland, tuneless, minimalistic piano, combined with yet more lyrical dissections of Matt Berninger’s fifteen-year marriage which, by this point, it really feels like he’s been going on about for fifteen years. Mercifully, however, this album has more meat on its bones than its anaemic predecessor. Most of the songs are nice enough; “New Order T-shirt” is a chirpy postcard from the past, “Tropic Morning News” is a welcome rush of blood to the head, and “Your Mind is Not Your Friend” offers an interesting take on mental illness (and thus, at long last, some subject matter other than the state of Matt’s marriage). The rest of the songs are passable, not offensively banal as on the preceding album, though the listener must be prepared to navigate a characteristically mortifying appearance from Taylor Swift. The truth, though, is that First Two Pages of Frankenstein is the National by numbers. They wisely retreat from the failed experimentalism of I Am Easy To Find back into their familiar Glum Rock, but it’s a pale imitation of what they once were, the work of a domesticated tribute act, “a television version of a person with a broken heart.”
* *
Standout track: “Tropic Morning News”

Laugh Track (2023)
In the days before Spotify, Last Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track would surely have been released as a double album of moody, low-key indie rock songs designed to narrate the troubled marriages of melancholy middle-aged men. In terms of tone and style, there’s little to choose between the two albums. The obligatory highlights here include “Alphabet City”, the album’s urgent and touching opener, and “Weird Goodbyes”, which is catchy and lyrically cohesive, I suppose. “Deep End” and “Space Invader” are enjoyably distressed though tiresomely earnest, like everything else from the National’s latter-day discography. The fans and critics seem to like “Smoke Detector” but, to be honest, by the end of this record and this album ranking, I was sick to death of Matt Berninger agonising about his marriage, and I couldn’t take another eight minutes of it. Overall, these late-stage National records remind me of the last few Daniel Craig Bond movies; they’ve had their balls cut off. The raffish humour, the howl of self-hatred at being a weak lust-filled male on “Available” – it’s all gone, neutered by the bizarre “progressive” puritanism of contemporary American life, the relentless political polarisation, Donald Trump, #MeToo, pandemic lockdowns, the end of the Fake Empire’s global hegemony, the disciplining terror of psychotic social media. That’s the historical context in which the most recent National albums have appeared, and its effect on their music has been stultifying.
* *
Standout track: “Weird Goodbyes”

Ranking
1. High Violet (* * * * *)
2. Boxer (* * * * *)
3. Trouble Will Find Me (* * * * *)
4. Alligator (* * * *)
5. Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers (* * *)
6. Sleep Well Beast (* *)
7. First Two Pages of Frankenstein (* *)
8. The National (* *)
9. Laugh Track (* *)
10. I Am Easy To Find (*)

Selected playlist
1. Mr November
2. Slow Show
3. Fake Empire
4. Sea of Love
5. Light Years
6. I Need My Girl
7. England
8. Day I Die
9. Bloodbuzz Ohio
10. Lucky You