Album Review: The National - Trouble Will Find Me

With their previous – the towering High Violet – The National's brand of clenched melancholy finally reached a wider audience. Trouble Will Find Me may well find them a few more.

It is familiar, and yet a little different. The opening I Should Live In Salt has the familiar dense atmospheres, which can drop away to a sparseness that cradles Matt Berninger's distinctive troubled baritone. There's still doubt and ache to his ruminations, yet as you start picking out lines he sometimes seems even more laconic – fewer words, but maybe less obtuse, more revealing. One best example, and possible centrepiece of the album, Don't Swallow The Cap – of course, as with past records, favourites will change the more you immerse yourself in it – Berninger simply confesses “Everything I love is on the table/I can't get the balance right”. And you believe him.

The music has evolved a degree as well. There's a little more variety in the background noise. Bryan Devendorf's muffled machine gun drumming more textured – Sufjan Stevens adding a bit of drum machine work, apparently. The guitars and other keyboard layers mesh and overlap. It swirls in its more energetic moments, like Slipped, jangling then occasionally throwing in a jarring percussive clank, just to shake the reverie.

And then there's just the sheer exhausted longing of I Need My Girl. Title says it all. This is the damaged romanticism of The National distilled. They remain down here with their Demons, knowing what various of those may be – but certainly not all. That they muse on them so eloquently could be what makes them increasingly great.