Anti-Climacus

I don't know that it qualifies as an endorsement, but I've found The National's Boxer to be an ideal accompaniment to late-evening conversations. In my younger and more vulnerable years, I would have therefore classified the album as 'boring,' but, as Stuart Murdoch says in the liner notes for Write About Love:

I took a break, and walked on down to the river, and along, as I usually do, listening to tunes that we’re working on. Pretty soon my head starts to hurt with the decision making process so I take time out, and I want to hear Everything But The Girl. I put on Each And Everyone, which was a hit for them in the mid-eighties.

I remember reading a review of the group – that they were music for schoolteachers to listen to. This was meant as dismissive, and it stuck for a while; it put me off liking them more because I was shallow and tempestuous. Now I can’t imagine anything better!

My tastes in music have always run toward the avant-garde; that something was difficult to listen to counted, usually, as a mark in favor of a musical act.* The counter to this tendency, however, was my initial exposure to music coming through R.E.M., which meant, for biographical reasons, the R.E.M. of its mellow and instrumentally rich early 90s period. As I get older, I lose some of my interest in those complicated and difficult bands in favor of those that are comparatively simpler. I spend a large portion of my life running around, attempting to cross off tasks from a list that never seems to get shorter; I'll take a quiet hour and slow conversation whenever I can manage it.


*I did extended stints with Miles Davis' Bitches Brew and dissonant jazz of various stripes; I liked Spaceman 3 and the more out-there moments of Spiritualized; and my affection for The Fall, P.i.L., and Can is not based on their (mostly nonexistent) melodic abilities. I do not, for these purposes, count Sonic Youth, because I only like their more melodic work, nor Yo La Tengo, who mostly relegate their sonic assaults to their live shows. I do, however, count the three minutes of Metal Machine Music I once listened to, and wound be willing to arrange a small but significant prize to anyone who could manage longer.