Necessitys the mother of invention, and just as U.K. racism gave rise in the late 1970s to the activist, mixed-race Two Tone scene, so has #MeToo informed a new wave of indie-rock. For a culture that likes to fancy itself woke despite an ongoing tradition of sexism and sexual predation, its heartening to see not only a new generation of women and non-binary artists up front, but cis bros evidently rethinking their work and privilege in gender-mixed contexts. This year, Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers teamed up as Better Oblivion Community Center. Ezra Koenig unveiled Vampire Weekend 2.0 on Father of The Bride with vocal help from Danielle Haim (and bonus points for the metatextual sample of Jenny Lewis singing the word boy.) On I Am Easy to Find, another standard-bearing indie dude brand has reconfigured itself with multiple womens voices at the LPs core, a portion of the roughly 77 musicians that temporarily explode the bands quintet. The album was also conceived of a piece with a luminously sad and lovely short film of the same name, directed with emotive minimalism by Mike Mills (20th Century Women), and starring Alicia Vikander, who pulls off a heartbreaking and quietly astonishing hat-trick by aging from cradle to grave in 26 minutes with no perceivable changes beyond movements and mannerisms.
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Evidently, as the African proverb suggests, it takes a village. But this art mobbing isnt out of character for The National, a band thats spent much of their career snowballing community, through festival curation (Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, the Eaux Claires Festival), producing friends records (for a time at Aaron Dessners Brooklyn home studio), operating a label (Brassland), and marshaling outsized projects like a five-plus-hour Grateful Dead homage (Day of The Dead) and the ever-growing 37d03d (aka: PEOPLE) collective.
I Am Easy to Find is, however, the first time theyve applied this approach to the band itself, and they pull it off without diluting their National-ness. Its a balancing act. You Had Your Soul With You begins with a stuttering melody built of sample-shards and Matt Berningers signature baritone incantations, which outline a failed relationship. The third verse is sung by Gail Ann Dorsey, Berninger eventually joining her in rueful harmony. The lyrical and formal suggestion, explored throughout the record, seems to be that it takes two to tango, and despite the canyon that separates our perceptions, however gendered, we all share vast tracts of emotional territory, and are capable of deep empathy. Whether we act on it is another story.
Dorseys dusky contralto, once David Bowies foil, also melds with Berningers voice on Roman Holiday and Hey Rosie. Tracks featuring higher-register singers plumb different tensions. Oblivions begins with Berninger trading lines with French singer/songwriter (and Bryce Dessners wife) Mina Tindle, before their voices converge, with Tindle out front, singing about marriage and the fear it fails to erase (Its the way you say yes when I ask you to marry me/You don t know what you are doing/Do you think you can carry me/Over the threshold/Over and over again until oblivion?). That Beninger hangs back in the mix is interesting, both because its ostensibly his show, and for how pop songs in mixing and arrangements have historically treated womens voices as subservient to mens, not unlike the way photographic technology favors Caucasian skin tones. Tonal balance and audio separation are small gestures, but they demonstrate the breadth of cultural sexisms that need dismantling.
The duet-centered songs are the strongest. In its poignant tick-tocking piano melody, the camera-shutter percussion, the bleep-blorp electronics, the brightly funereal brass, the elegant choral and string arrangements, the title track beautifully skeins almost every sonic byway the groups been exploring lately. A Big Apple tale, Berninger sings about towers, lies, and the way city life can rip a union apart, with Kate Stables, of the idiosyncratic English folk-rock group This Is The Kit, matching nearly every word. You never were much of a New Yorker/ It wasnt in your eyes, the couple sing to one another, with equal parts accusation and resignation.
In a similar way, The Pull of You suggests the banter of arch, articulate, probably degreed lovers New York Review of Books readers, in therapy, whose smarts, sensitivity and self-awareness cant save them or their relationship. And Not in Kansas uses a list of the things we use to define ourselves beloved music, movies, drugs to pin its character like a butterfly:
Smidges of bad ecstasy
Must have left it in my pocket
With my Christianity and my rocket
Im binging hard on Annette Bening
And listening to REM again
Begin The Begin over and over
Its a tragicomic song, and Berninger sings it mostly alone, though one wonders how much of it was written by his life- and writing partner, Carin Besser, who co-wrote the sets lyrics along with Berninger and Mike Mills. The loss in the song is palpable, as it is in Light Years, which ends the record in a swirl of strings and flashbacks, soft regret and acceptance that faintly bitter taste that grows strangely appealing over time. Like the short movie, it doesnt offer any morals or profound truths. Just beauty, and an invitation to savor it while you can.