The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
The National · Matt Berninger, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, Scott and Bryan Devendorf · 4AD · eleven tracks, about 48 minutes
Mode
Indie rock in the literate baritone line, enlarged to walls of guitar, brass, strings and driving drums
Mythos
The prodigal carried home, sorrow as a figure who waits, a comic monster, an elsewhere in the rain, a closing benediction: myth evoked in images, not built
Phase
Eleven tracks; a buried opening that ends in flood, fears gathered at the centre, a level middle, a last swell and a closing hymn
Presentation
Album; eleven songs of like size, about forty-eight minutes, with no interludes and no instrumental tracks; an expanded edition followed in the same year
Register
A low, close baritone of narrow range held steady inside dense and often murky arrangements; rolling toms, layered guitars and keyboards, brass and strings
Scale
One man in his house and his city: a marriage, a child, a debt, Ohio behind him and England far off
Governing Proposition
Five musicians who had made hushed baritone songs of adult unease build the same low voice into walls of guitar, brass, strings and driving drums, and find that in a settled life comfort does not quiet fear but feeds it. The record opens underwater and ends in a hymn, carrying one private pressure through money, marriage and parenthood until it can be sung in company.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record begins underwater. A guitar figure is buried in distortion, the voice sits low in the mix, and for a long while nothing rises clear of the murk. Then the parts accumulate, the drums gather, and the song breaks into a torrent with the voice carried inside it rather than above it. Before a listener has made out the words, the record’s condition has been stated in sound: a steady self in a pressure that keeps building. The song is about a dependency, a love that is also a fear, and its form does not describe that state so much as put the listener in it.
The band had been making hushed records in this voice for years. Matt Berninger’s baritone is low, close and narrow in range, and on Alligator and Boxer it had been set in rooms with space around it. Here the rooms fill. Aaron and Bryce Dessner’s guitars and keyboards are layered into walls, brass and strings are worked into them, and Bryan Devendorf’s drums drive harder than before. The voice does not rise to meet the noise. It keeps its level, a calm voice in a crowded room, and that composure under pressure is the subject of nearly every song that follows.
The opener is also where the making shows its seams. The murk that states the condition also obscures it, and the band thought the track rough enough to re-record it within the year, for the expanded edition that followed the album in 2010. The album as first released, in May 2010, keeps the rough version, and it is the right one for this record: what follows is built as a passage out of that murk. Eleven songs of like size follow the first sound, with no interludes and no instrumental tracks, and the sixth, at the centre, is the song in which the private pressure acquires an address.
Movement II
Bloodbuzz Ohio stands at the centre of the record, and it holds the record’s three pressures in one song. A man owes money to the money he owes, and the phrasing turns the debt into a loop that cannot be paid out of. He is carried back to Ohio, borne by a swarm of bees, to a place that does not remember him, and the floor is falling out from under everyone he knows. Love, home and money arrive in the same breath and the same low register, and none of them is a refuge from the others.
The pull of the place is in the drums. Bryan Devendorf’s rolling toms carry the song forward like a road, and the voice rides on them without hurrying. The homecoming is the prodigal’s, though the song never says so, and the swarm may be heard as Samson’s lion and the honey found in it, though nothing in the song requires that. The images are strong and they stay particular: this is a man, a state and a debt, not an emblem. The record’s figures work this way throughout. They summon an old pattern for a moment and then let it go, keeping the man in view.
What the song discloses can be put in a sentence, and the sentence holds: in a settled adult life, comfort does not quiet fear but feeds it. The debt belongs to the year of the recession, and the record carries that year in it, but the condition is older than the year and has outlasted it. That is the record’s claim, and it is a claim about a meaning, not only a mood. Bloodbuzz Ohio is where it is made most fully, in a song dense enough to bear the whole album’s weight and placed where the album can rest on it.
Movement III
Afraid of Everyone moves from fear for a child to fear of everyone. The love that should make a man safe makes him afraid, and protection turns into paranoia with no moment at which the turn could be refused. A tense, repeating drum pattern runs under the voice and will not loosen, so the fear is in the pulse before it is in the words, and the song tightens its dread into a kind of grandeur. It is the record’s most exact disclosure, and it widens the private pressure of the opening toward the public world, which the song touches obliquely, from inside the house.
Conversation 16 turns the same fear inward. A husband confesses that he is afraid he would eat his wife’s brains, a zombie’s line delivered as a joke, and the joke admits an appetite he distrusts in himself. The confession is a statement, not a texture: it can be paraphrased, and what it says about a marriage holds. With Bloodbuzz Ohio and Afraid of Everyone it forms the spine of what the record knows, three songs in which money, the child and the marriage are each found to be a source of dread as much as of safety.
The knowledge has precedent. The anxious middle-class self, comfortable and afraid, had been drawn by Cheever, Updike and Carver, and the record does not add a term they lacked. What it adds is pressure: the condition is not narrated but undergone, in a voice that keeps its composure while the sound around it thickens. Much of the record renders the mood of that condition rather than its terms, and its words come in oblique fragments. Where it states, as in these three songs, it states plainly; where it does not, it surrounds the listener with the feeling and leaves the meaning to be inferred.
Movement IV
The middle of the record is level ground. Anyone’s Ghost, a short song, restates the opener’s dependency. Little Faith and Runaway share a tempo and a hush, so that either could carry that stretch alone. Lemonworld’s drowsy idleness is the one glimpse of the ease the record’s dread is set against, and it earns its place by that contrast. Here the songs hold a shared mood rather than advance an argument, and their order could change without loss. The form that elsewhere carries what the record knows becomes, for a stretch, a container for it.
The inheritance the record turns from is mostly the band’s own. Alligator (2005) and Boxer (2007) had already made the hushed baritone chamber rock that this record enlarges, in a lineage that runs through Joy Division, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and the Tindersticks. The turn here is in weight. The guitars thicken, the orchestration grows heavier, the drums drive harder, and the songs reach for the size of a larger room. The forms are the band’s forms, the voice keeps its register, and the subjects carry over: adult fear, money, marriage, drink and the city.
That turn had a stake. A sound built on intimacy was enlarged at the risk of losing it, and the intimacy was kept, in the voice and in the words. But the move was toward a larger audience, not away from one, and it confirmed the path the band was already on. The record does not leave its tradition; it fills it out to a scale the tradition had seldom tried. The literate, private line of American indie rock had tended to stay small, and this record showed that it could carry its inward subjects at full orchestral and rock density without leaving the register of confession.
Movement V
The close comes in two steps. England swells through brass and strings into the largest sound on the record, toward an elsewhere where the lost one lives well in the rain: absence given a place. Then Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks, a hymn, in which the voice that has held its level alone for ten songs is joined and lifted, and the crybaby of its title stands for all who hang themselves for love. The pressure first suffered in the murk of the opening is shared at the end. The hymn resolves what the opener only endured, and it has the shape of a benediction.
The record’s later life follows from that ending. Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks became the band’s closing song, sung by crowds. Terrible Love, re-recorded within the year, became a concert mainstay, and the songs stood at the centre of the band’s concerts through the following decade. In 2013, at MoMA PS1 in New York, the band played Sorrow over and over for about six hours in A Lot of Sorrow, a piece by the artist Ragnar Kjartansson, and the song held to the end. Aaron Dessner’s later work as a producer carried something of the record’s sound into the pop mainstream.
That six-hour performance is the best image of what the record is and is not: a deep well in a narrow place. The making is exact, and one condition governs the record from its first sound to its last. What it discloses is real and can be stated. But its turn was a change of weight on a path already open, its myths are glimpsed and not built, and the world it holds is one man’s house and city, with the public world seen from inside. It does not remake the music it belongs to. It is a serious record that has lasted, and it ends where it meant to, in company.
Act III · The Twelve
Eleven tracks, and the frame is compelled. Terrible Love must open, stating the condition in sound before any song names it, and Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks must close, a hymn the record reaches only by passing through the rest. Bloodbuzz Ohio, Afraid of Everyone, Conversation 16 and England are each required by what the record says about home, fear, guilt and absence. Lemonworld’s drowsy idleness earns its place as the one glimpse of the ease the dread is set against. The test bites elsewhere in the middle: Anyone’s Ghost restates the opener’s dependency without adding a term, and Little Faith and Runaway share a tempo and a hush, so either could carry that stretch alone.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: in a settled adult life, comfort does not quiet fear but feeds it, and love, money and parenthood each breed dread as much as safety. In Bloodbuzz Ohio a man owes money to the money he owes, a debt the phrasing turns into a loop. Afraid of Everyone moves from fear for a child to fear of everyone. Conversation 16 has a husband confess, as a joke, an appetite he distrusts in himself. That is a meaning, and it holds sixteen years on. Held back because the middle renders mood more than terms, the words come in oblique fragments, and the anxious middle-class self had precedent in Cheever, Updike and Carver.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Elevation comes often, as release from pressure. Terrible Love begins buried in distortion and builds until drums and voice break into a torrent. Bloodbuzz Ohio carries a forward rush on its rolling drums, and Afraid of Everyone tightens dread into a kind of grandeur. England swells through brass and strings into the largest sound on the record, and Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks rises as a hymn in which the voice is joined and lifted. Sorrow and Runaway reach a quieter beauty. The height is bounded: it seldom reaches terror or transport, because the low, level baritone keeps the self in the room, and Anyone’s Ghost, Little Faith and Lemonworld stay on the plain.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth is evoked in strong images and built nowhere. A man is carried back to Ohio in a swarm of bees, which may be heard as Samson’s lion and its honey, and the prodigal’s homecoming hangs over the song. Sorrow is a figure who finds a child and waits for him, and wins. Conversation 16 has a zombie, England is the elsewhere where the lost one lives well in the rain, and the closing hymn, shaped as a benediction, is sung for all who hang themselves for love. But no pattern bears load across the sequence. The figures stay particular, which is the record’s strength, and the swarm and the zombie remain metaphors, not structures.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The inheritance is the band’s own: the hushed baritone chamber rock of Alligator (2005) and Boxer (2007), descended from Joy Division, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and the Tindersticks. The turn here is in density and scale. The guitars thicken into walls, the orchestration grows heavier and the drums drive harder. A sound built on intimacy was enlarged at the risk of losing it, and the intimacy was kept, in the voice and the words. But this is a change of weight more than of direction: the forms, the register and the subjects carry over, and the stake was a larger audience, not the loss of the one the band had.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows, because its knowledge is in the pressure of the sound against the voice. The arrangements are dense, layered and often murky, and the baritone sits low inside them; that is the condition the songs describe. Terrible Love enacts it most fully, opening buried and ending in flood. Afraid of Everyone puts the fear in a repeating drum pattern, and Bloodbuzz Ohio’s rolling toms are the homeward pull. The sequence runs from that murk through the gathered fears to a hymn that turns private pressure into common song. In the middle the form matters less: four songs hold one mood, and their order could change.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Evidence first, and sixteen years supply some of an unusual kind. In 2013, at MoMA PS1 in New York, the band played Sorrow repeatedly for about six hours in A Lot of Sorrow, a work by Ragnar Kjartansson: a literal test of return on one song, which held. Terrible Love was re-recorded within the year and became a concert mainstay, and Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks became the band’s closing song, sung by the crowd. The layered mixes hold detail that shows on return, and the oblique words reward rehearing. Against that, the critical and formal literature is thin, much of the yield is the mood re-entered, and most of the evidence attaches to two or three songs.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is American indie rock in its literate, chamber-orchestrated line, and the contest is with that line’s habit of staying small. The record showed that the anxieties of settled adult life, money, marriage and children, could be carried at full orchestral and rock density without leaving the register of confession. That is an enlargement of scale, not a reorganisation of possibility: the materials were in Cohen, Cave, Springsteen’s quieter records and the band’s own Boxer. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the adult indie rock of the following decade owes the band much, and Aaron Dessner’s later production carried something of this sound into the pop mainstream, a delayed reach credited at a discount.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Survival is weighed over sixteen years, on what has been shown. The record survives whole, and the expanded edition of the same year added to it without displacing it. Sixteen years of presence follow: its songs stood at the centre of the band’s concerts through the following decade, its closing hymn is sung back by crowds, and one song carried a six-hour work of art. The fabric is intact. What it has not yet shown is survival past the conditions that produced it: the debt of the recession and the comfortable dread of 2010 are still close, and the dense, compressed production belongs to its years, with Terrible Love’s murk a date stamp.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and load-bearing in places rather than throughout. Bryan Devendorf’s drumming carries much of the record: the rolling toms of Bloodbuzz Ohio and the insistent pattern of Afraid of Everyone are the songs’ engines, not their accompaniment. The Dessner brothers layer guitar and keyboard parts so that several figures move at once, and the brass and strings are worked into the band’s sound, not laid on it. Berninger’s baritone is placed close and low, a fixed point against moving music. The faults fall across a share of the record: the density muddies the mix, the band thought the opener rough enough to re-record, and several middle tracks share one palette. That holds it a tenth under Boxer, a making load-bearing throughout with one fault, the rung where Fallingwater stands.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs the record: a steady voice keeping its composure inside a pressure it cannot master. The two most distant elements obey it. Terrible Love, a private dependency as noise and flood, and Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks, a hymn sung in company, are the same pressure, first suffered alone and then shared; the hymn resolves what the opener only endures. The debt of Bloodbuzz Ohio and the fear of Afraid of Everyone arrive in the same low register as love, and no song breaks the law. What holds the figure is range: the tone runs only from hush to swell, the subject is the settled adult in his house and city, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held fully, in every song a mind under quiet strain. The family is held: marriage in Conversation 16 and Runaway, parenthood in Afraid of Everyone. Money enters as debt in Bloodbuzz Ohio, though labour is absent. Ohio and England give place and origin. The sacred appears as a title, Little Faith, and as the form of the closing hymn; public life touches Afraid of Everyone obliquely; nature, history and technology are absent or glimpsed. The joins are real: one consciousness makes them, and Bloodbuzz Ohio holds love, home and money in one song. What holds the figure is the count and the vantage: the orders are few, and the public ones are seen only from inside the house.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.5, then The Sublime at 8.3 and The Inner Law at 8.2. Drumming, layering and a close, low voice that in places carry the songs rather than accompany them; elevation as release from pressure on six or seven of eleven tracks, from the opener’s flood to the closing hymn; and one law, a steady voice inside a pressure it cannot master, unbroken from the murk of the first song to the company of the last.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed and The Swerve at 7.0: consciousness, the family, debt and place held by one mind, with labour absent and the public orders seen only from inside the house; and a turn that enlarges the band’s own sound in weight without changing its direction. Below them, The Archetypal Deep at 7.2, where strong images, a swarm, a zombie, a benediction, evoke old patterns and build none.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.1, The Unconcealment at 8.0, Pressure on Tradition at 7.5, The Archetypal Deep at 7.2 and The Swerve at 7.0 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Archetypal Deep, 7.2, and The Swerve, 7.0, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the album as first released by 4AD in May 2010, eleven tracks in their original order, about forty-eight minutes, judged from knowledge of the recording, its lyrics and its reception; no recording or lyric sheet was in hand, and running times are approximate. The expanded edition issued later in 2010, with its re-recorded Terrible Love, further studio songs and live material, and the 2013 performance of Sorrow in Ragnar Kjartansson’s A Lot of Sorrow at MoMA PS1, are evidence for the record’s return, reach and survival, not the object. Songs are cited by title; no lyric is quoted, and the images described are paraphrased. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact date of release and running time, the studio, mixer and arrangers, the guest singers and the chart positions, are not given.