We're The Heirs to The Glimmering World - Alligator turns 10

The thing about revisiting The National’s Alligator a decade after its original release is that you can’t think about where the band went after this, but where the band was coming from.

Started as a ramshackle, genre bending outfit in the year 2001, the group started to work towards the moodier, more literate Alligator sound by the time they released both the follow up to their self-titled debut, 2003’s Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, and the 2004 Cherry Tree EP. It’s on those two efforts where you can begin to hear the darker, tenser, and visceral sound that the band captured on Alligator.

It seems an odd comparison, but Alligator could be The National’s Born to Run, if you will—a “go for broke” attempt to bust out of super-indie obscurity and become more than just another blog buzz band that would fizzle out within a few years time.

While Born to Run was a runaway success for Bruce Springsteen, Alligator, originally released in April of 2005, was a critical success for the band, but they were still playing tiny venues to even tinier crowds. It wasn’t until the band reissued the album with a bonus disc of B-sides that it started to gain traction in the spring of 2006, allowing their profile to grow even larger in the year before their real breakthrough, 2007’s Boxer.

In early June 2007 tour supporting Boxer, The National played to a well beyond capacity crowd at the now defunct hole in the wall, The 400 Bar, in Minneapolis. The band was stunned, and said that the last time they played in Minneapolis, there were less than 30 people at the show.

It was thanks to the 2006 reissue of Alligator, and the subsequent intelligent move on their label at the time, Beggar’s Banquet to advertise on Pitchfork’s homepage, that I first discovered the band.  I continued to see the ad, was captivated by the mysterious cover art, and intended to give the album a listen. It seems worth noting that it was my friend Mike who had…acquired…a copy of Alligator, and thought it may be something I’d be into.

To his day, I think he still prides himself on being the one that turned me onto a group, which at this time, was a bit of a role reversal in our dynamic.

The thing about Alligator is that it’s a once in a lifetime kind of record. The National, as a band, will never be that hungry or desperate or urgent sounding again. It’s the band at their most visceral, and it’s still a time when lyricist and frontman Matt Berninger was still uncomfortable in his skin—he shredded his throat screaming the ending to “Mr. November”; he still “talked-sang” on this album, not growing comfortable with his own voice, range, and ability to sing until five years later; he paced around anxiously on stage; and his lyrics were incredibly disjunctive and evocative—painting bizarre and gorgeous images—borrowing themes and ideas from books and plays.

Alligator isn’t a claustrophobic sounding album, but it’s a dark album. There’s kind of an ominous presence that floats above the album’s 13 tracks—and even when it soars, like the beautiful string and wind ensemble arrangements on “The Geese of Beverly Road”—it’s still enclosed by this haunted, somber darkness. It’s not a sad album per se, but it’s a very real album—and it came along at the right time for me.  Berninger was in his mid-30s by the time Alligator was released, and if you are able to decipher anything from his lyrics, there’s a lot about the unnerving uncertainty of adulthood, a theme that would later establish itself in Boxer and in High Violet.

It’s by no means a perfect album—it stumbles early with the plodding “Karen” and “Looking For Astronauts,” but it recovers with a practically flawless final six-track run that burns slowly through the dark “Val Jester,” and ends with the explosive and frantic “Mr. November.” It’s unintentionally funny at times—“Baby, We’ll Be Fine;” it’s blunt to the point of being uncomfortable and misogynistic—“Karen;” but it’s also incredibly intelligent—the double shot of “The Geese of Beverly Road” and “City Middle” is unfuckwithable and powerful even a decade later.

Alligator is one of those rare albums that’s timeless, yet it takes you back to where you were the first time you heard it. It’s aged surprisingly well, and still sounds relevant and just as urgent as it did in the mid-2000s. For me, it takes me back to a transitional time in my life where I was trying to leave behind the college town of Dubuque, Iowa, and move up to Minnesota. It was the soundtrack for long drives back and forth between states; it was the soundtrack to the first summer I lived here in Northfield, seguing into the autumn. It recalls all the anxieties and hopes of that time.

It’s an album about feeling young and invincible but knowing that feeling is fleeting and will be gone in an instant. It’s an album about wanting more, but not knowing where to start.

I’m in a state. Nothing can touch us, my love.