The National
Alligator

THE REVIEW

Sometimes you arrive late, sometimes you never arrive. Often it happens by chance: noise. In the daily noise, you discern a sound so clear that you can’t help but isolate yourself from the rest of the world and tune into it. The alligator bites you when the first notes of "Secret Meeting" wedge themselves into the folds of your hearing. But it's a sweet bite, two hinted notes of some string; a broken drum. As a beginning, not bad, you start to say and think.
Then the voice comes in; after a few seconds when you feel like you’ve entered a dream where the protagonists are the Death Cab For Cutie with Paul Banks on vocals, you wake up, but no awakening was more welcome.

The guy in question is named Matt Berninger, and his ability to envelope you is surprising. He starts with that sideways and lazy tone like Ian Curtis, but with the cheekiness of Bryan Ferry and a crystal-clear class. The hit is not easy to absorb, but after being dazed by the first track, you place little hope in what's to come because such a thing can't happen too many times in a lifetime, let alone in just one album. And yet "Karen" comes on, and when that kind of litanic-refrain arrives, you melt like wax, you become fluid, and it feels like you can slip everywhere chasing that melody.
From here on, you're free to hover among the jewels scattered throughout the record, and every time you're halfway between wanting to listen to the next track and wanting to hear a few more seconds of the current track. You remain trapped among the cushions scattered in the soundscape of "Looking For Astronauts", a magnetic chant; you glimpse the welcoming desert behind the glass of “Daughters Of The Soho Riots”; you're surprised by the sudden accelerations of “All The Wine”, “Abel”, and “Mr. November”; you find yourself cradled and sublimated by the waves of “Val Jester” and “The Geese Of Beverly Road”.

Post-rock, new-wave, sadcore? I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know. I wish I could be struck every day by a diamond of such brightness, this album will accompany me for a long time, with its irreverently '70s cover, so anonymous and cold as to contain the warmth and not allow it to dissipate.