Americana Coldplay: The National’s First Two Pages of Frankenstein reviewed

Once upon a time, rock bands wished for nothing more than to look as though they posed a clear and present danger to your children. Though a few true believers still hold to this honourable creed, nowadays most groups are comprised of the kind of people one might expect to be grading your offspring’s dissertation at a respected Russell Group institution.

The National exemplify rock’s professorial bent: bespectacled academic types, bearded, literate, wry and congenitally suspicious of happiness. Relatability sells, apparently. Almost by stealth, the American quintet have become one of the most successful groups of the age, winning Grammys, headlining festivals and selling out arenas with wordy songs charged with a kind of pulsing melancholy; a softly anthemic intimacy. The National have become huge while seeming not to lose sight of the smallest things. If they were an author, they might be Anne Tyler.

Their ninth album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, is named after the Mary Shelley novel that helped bring singer and lyricist Matt Berninger out of a prolonged slough of despond, a middle-life crisis articulated movingly on the undulating ‘Your Mind is Not Your Friend’ and elsewhere. When I saw the National at Connect festival last summer, Berninger laughed at the notion that fans played their songs at weddings. ‘I always think we’re more of a divorce band,’ he said. No kidding. Though he sings here about performing for ‘teenagers on ice’, this is music for their anxious parents. The album is the sound of jittery evenings, lost friends and lost faith, confusion, despair. It’s not exactly a barrel of laughs, but it’s testament to the National’s weird alchemy that it feels more uplifting than it might.

Musically, they are no revolutionaries.