Review Summary: This one’s like your mother’s arms, when she was young and sunburned in the ‘80s
It’s an odd thing that the turn of phrase which resonates with me most on
Sleep Well Beast isn’t even a song lyric, despite The National being a lyrically-inclined band, and myself being a lyrically-inclined music fan. Instead, it’s a song title. “Dark Side Of The Gym” might be a somewhat mopey but still romantic little tune, the kind The National could churn out in their sleep, but what a title, man. I can’t say if this is really a universal phenomenon or not, but as an American kid, this reviewer spent countless hours of childhood and adolescence in gymnasiums, with those overhead lights which came on slowly, one at a time, and often only some were needed, leaving much of the space without illumination. Not much of significance in my young life happened in those conditions, and I surely have forgotten most of these instances entirely, but I sure spent a lot of time hanging out in or adjacent to the “Dark Side Of The Gym”, sometimes with life-long friends, sometimes with people whose paths have diverged so completely that I don’t even remember their names. So there it is, that hazy sense of half-remembrance, the meaning I ascribe to that startlingly evocative song title. Please forgive the navel-gazing, as I do find it relevant given it displays a lot of what The National are about on
Sleep Well Beast . It’s an album full of the regrets and uneasiness of adulthood, but also complete with bittersweet backwards looks at days long gone. This record sure as hell isn’t the group’s most consistent piece of work, but it may just be their most thematically-complete one. It’s a mature work, yes, fitting for a set of bandmates who had been fixtures in the indie scene for well over a decade by the time of its release, but
Sleep Well Beast defines maturity not by throwing away childish things, but rather putting these reminisces in their proper place.
This is an album which is, in several respects, transitional. In terms of quality, most seem to (fairly) place it somewhere between the near-untouchable standards of their previous four albums, and the widely-derided mess of 2019’s
I Am Easy To Find . As such, it can be interpreted as the band slipping a bit, but still maintaining their customary magic, at least here and there. Sonically, too, this is an unusually-scattered effort by The National. While most of these tunes are sedate even by The National’s easy-going standards, the sleepy likes of “Nobody Else Will Be There” and “Carin At The Liquor Store” rub elbows with unexpectedly rocking tunes like “Day I Die” and “Turtleneck”. The band also has notably moved here to incorporate more obvious electronic influences on a number of the tracks (even if this direction was a long-time in coming). All in all, though, The National (probably fortunately) managed to avoid the brunt of the excessive artsiness which they careened into on their following effort.
A reader unfamiliar with The National or this album specifically, at this point, might wonder why I felt the need to write this review. Sure, it’s an uneven collection of songs which doesn’t live up to the band’s prime, what’s the big deal? Well, first, The National on a bad day are still pretty top-tier in their field. There are a number of tunes here which are all-time classics, and even the weaker material isn’t all that shabby. More broadly though,
Sleep Well Beast possesses an overriding theme, subtle but powerful, one that a listener doesn’t quite find in the same mixture throughout the rest of the band’s beloved discography. In short,
Sleep Well Beast is another chapter in the frequently cited (half-mockingly) journey of The National as perfect avatars of contemporary American middle-class ennui. And yes, I’m turning thirty this year, why do you ask?
There’s been plenty of ink (mostly digital, these days) spilled over the years about how The National’s most renowned set of albums represented a trilogy of life stages near-perfectly.
Alligator was the narrator’s early twenties, discovering some of the undersides of adulthood while still maintaining periodic bursts of youthful fire.
Boxer was the next stage, perhaps foretelling marriage and such, somewhat bleak but with tinges of romanticism.
High Violet represented a culmination into adulthood, with a sublimation of youthful hopes and dreams into the rote routine of the day-to-day. By this metric, 2013’s
Trouble Will Find Me is a little the odd man out, largely maintaining the previous three albums’ standard of quality, but not as coherently providing a particular vibe. Four years later, though, with
Sleep Well Beast , The National seems to have honed in once again upon a desired theme. The end results are a world-weary and often profoundly dreary collection of vignettes of middle-age, but not without their beauty. If anything, the band is more reflective than ever before, frequently dwelling on childhood and the past, and when these songs hit the mark, they are astoundingly poignant. Even on the somber perusing of marital trouble that is “Empire Line”, Matt Berninger muses “there’s a line that goes all the way from my childhood to you”. Or in the utterly-sublime “Carin At The Liquor Store”, there’s this vintage gem “I see you in stations and on invitations”, simultaneously vaguely humorous and an immensely touching description of falling out of another person’s life. On the crushing “Guilty Party”, Berninger delivers the piercing couplet “another year gets away, another summer of love, I don’t know why I care, we miss it every summer”. It’s heart-wrenching, especially when set to musical accompaniment and delivered brilliantly, but it’s not exactly representative of the mood of
Sleep Well Beast . Sure, this a depressing listen, but The National feel like they’ve learned to live with things here, even as they remain a brooding bunch.
I could spend some more time dwelling on this album’s missteps, like the fact that “Born To Beg” is more-or-less The National by the numbers, or that “Turtleneck” frankly isn’t that good of a song. On the flip side,
Sleep Well Beast also contains some absolute stunners, from the somber opening beauty of “Nobody Else Will Be There” to the all-time greatness of “I’ll Still Destroy You” to the repetitive but gut-punching “Guilty Party”. But in the end, all that really doesn’t matter much. By the time the title track brings the album to a close, in a manner that I found entirely forgettable for years until a recent listen when it lulled me into a sort of brilliant hypnosis and directly inspired this review, this record acquires a sort of meaning: all of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly. If it’s a bit of a muddled listen, that’s ok, because isn’t that what life is sometimes, muddling through?
Sleep Well Beast resonates with this reviewer, a guy who recently got (happily) married and acquired a new (great) job, but whose mom just died a few months ago, sees his old friends far less than he'd like as they're scattered across the country, and feels generally adrift as he gets older. Regardless of whether your personal circumstances are completely different from mine or we have a lot in common, The National are the kind of band that can speak directly to your soul, and even as one of their genuinely lesser efforts,
Sleep Well Beast is staunch evidence of this.
