It's true - in Alligator and Boxer, the National have wrought something special, a pair of albums each imbued with whatever it is that sets a rock and roll record apart and marks it as something a little bit transcendent...as between the two, well, Alligator is pretty great, but it's Boxer that really amazes - I reckon Julian F got it exactly right when he called the record a future classic, because that's just what it sounds like. It has a resonance that can't be mistaken.
Every single song on Boxer is good, and it's perfectly sequenced, its individual tracks subtly reflecting and building upon each other as they go, the whole much more than the sum of the parts. The album leads off with one of its clear highlights, the downbeat anthem "Fake Empire", at once totally contemporary chamber-pop influenced indie rock and classicist synthesis of the several pop music strands to be heard wrapped up in its sound, and then kicks it with the propulsive surge of "Mistaken For Strangers" before rounding off its first suite with the one-two of the murky, lovely brood of "Brainy" (very different sounding from its immediate predecessor on the record, but wreathed in the same post-punk aesthetic) and "Squalor Victoria" 's faster-paced but equally haunted rockisms.
Then, Boxer's dark, velvet heart, "Green Gloves" and "Slow Show": the first mysterious, subterranean and never quite resolving; the second providing the payoff, its coda - "you know I dreamed about you for 29 years before I saw you" - delivering one of the album's most apparently straightforward emotional payloads, yet in a way which still leaves one suspended somewhere between anticipation and resolution.
After that, "Apartment Story", another contemporary take on the Springsteen thing (see also "Keep The Car Running"), and done well, and then two deceptively low-key tracks, "Start A War" and "Racing Like A Pro", separated by probably the album's sprightliest moment (at least on purely musical terms), "Guest Room", which reminds me, it has to be said, of the handful of latter-day U2 songs that have held anything of the old magic (especially a couple of the better moments on All That You Can't Leave Behind), though if there's a stadium rock band's lp to which Boxer as a whole merits comparison, it's unquestionably R.E.M.'s New Adventures In Hi-Fi...anyhow, those two - "Start A War" and "Racing Like A Pro" - while not immediately memorable, turn out to be two of the deepest running songs on the record, and certainly two of those which I most commonly find echoing in my head...after which the band brings it home with the relaxed elegance of "Ada" and "Gospel", not stretching for anything over and above the rest of the album but instead finding the ideal way to wind things up in light of what has come before, on a gentle decline in which things continue to unfurl and re-ravel.
All told, it feels like there's a single thread running through the album - which has more than a little, I think, to do with the fact that it's the first album in ages that I've genuinely wanted to listen to over and over from start to finish (the last one before it was probably Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga once that one took root), and the first in even longer that I've felt like listening to in the dark, at night, with no distractions and nothing in my awareness except the music (the last couple having been, I reckon, Fox Confessor and In The Aeroplane... back in the first half of '06, or perhaps the Marie Antoinette soundtrack).
Alligator, which came before Boxer, can't help but suffer by comparison; despite, in "Abel" and "Mr November", housing the two most clarion songs to appear on either album, it feels a more muted record than that other, and it's certainly less perfect. Still, when it hits, it really hits - both of the abovementioned are great, and the jittery, catchy "Friend Of Mine" and the contemplative driftiness of "Daughters of the Soho Riots", not to mention the opening run of "Secret Meeting", "Karen" and "Lit Up", also stick indelibly...and I feel that it probably still has more room to grow on me, being that bit more understated and shadowy...
It strikes me that I haven't managed to say much about the National's sound on these two albums, but the truth is that their music has sunk in for me at a level which feels as if it has very little to do with the details of the sound itself - it's a tonal thing more than, say, a melodic or an instrumental one in particular...it's great, is what it comes down to - that's all.
