Album Review: The National - A Lot of Sorrow
Imagine listening to the same song, 99 times in a row.
Growing up, the “repeat” button on my CD boombox was a bit
of a novelty that I indulged in with specific songs—“Basket Case” by Green Day
comes to mind as one I would program to play over, and over, and over again.
Eventually, you grow out of listening to the same song
multiple times in a row, and you become the kind of individual that only needs
to hear that song once, and can move on; or, you become the kind of person who
listens to the whole album.
Two years ago, The National played the song “Sorrow” 99
times as part of an art installation at the Museum of Modern Art, or the “MoMA”
as its often called. The show was recorded, and released earlier this summer as
a 9xLP boxed set called A Lot of Sorrow.
No digital download of this exists, and only 1,500 copies of the boxed set were
produced. But, because the internet, someone ripped this, and the entire thing
turned up in one of the places where I go to….obtain music for review purposes.
As expected, it sounds exactly like the band performing the
song 99 times in a row.
But it’s also more than that.
It’s the sound a band barely holding it together, but
somehow pulling through for six fucking hours, playing one song, and one song
only.
“We’re only going to play one encore,” National frontman
Matt Berninger says amid laughter from the crowd before the song is played for
the 99th time. “This one’s called ‘Sorrow.’”
And it’s that take that he flubs the lyrics more then once,
laughs at himself for doing so, and sounds generally touched by how
enthusiastic the audience (still) is at this point—singing along the words to a
song they’ve heard 98 times before.
And that’s why this is worth listening to, at least once.
Because while the band plays “Sorrow” 99 times, it’s different each time. The
drums come in in a different place—sometimes not at all, and the Dessner
brothers twin guitar attacks are different nearly every time the song is
played—different effects, different bursts of energy, different solos during
the little instrumental bridge section, different introspective pluckings
scattered throughout.
You may think that sounds boring, or monotonous to listen
to. And yes, in a sense, it might be. But it’s also interesting, as a die hard
fan of the band (like I am), to hear The National really exploring the song,
and trying new things with it each time around.
I seem to find myself in a situation where I need to immerse
myself in the music I am reviewing for this blog—case in point, making it
through the 8 hour Max Richter thing earlier, or listening to tape
manipulations that just end up enveloping you as you listen to them.
With A Lot of Sorrow,
as you can guessed, you become the
song.
It becomes a weird, fucked up mantra that you end up
repeating to yourself over and over again, along with the band.
At this point, it seems worth noting my personal connection
to “Sorrow,” which is why I was even the slightest bit interested in listening
to the same song being played for six hours.
“Sorrow,” like the best and finest National songs, is my life. Like “Conversation 16” and
“Pink Rabbits,” I am those songs. Those are stark reflections of my own
miserable, struggling existence.
In 2010, when I first heard “Sorrow,” it was just another
National song—certainly not what I called the strongest on High Violet, but it also wasn’t horrible. It wasn’t until within
recent years that I realized my connection to the song.
Sorrow found me when I
was young. Sorrow waited, sorrow won.
Sorrow, they put me on
the pill. It’s in my honey, it’s in my milk.
Then, later: Because I
don’t want to get over you.
There reaches a point when you’ve been struggling with
depression for this long, and you’ve
been on and off and on a medicine cabinet full of failed prescription drugs
that you can’t really recall what your life was like before all of this happened.
I mean, you maybe have a vague memory of your life
before—maybe you were less anxious. Maybe you were a little easier going. Maybe
you were able to deal with banal conversations a little better than you do now.
Maybe you didn’t find yourself just being crushed by an overwhelming sense of
sadness and emptiness.
Whatever the case, there was a point when you were a
different you.
But then you reach a point where that you seems like
stranger, and the current you is all you know. And you reach a point where you
start to wonder if you are sabotaging your own attempts at getting better, or
if you even want to get better, or if you are desperately clinging on to
something that you can’t stand, only because it’s all you know.
These are the things you think about when you listen to the
same song, about depression, over and over and over again.
A Lot of Sorrow is
a lot of things—it’s the soundtrack to a weird art installation, it’s the same
song played 99 times over the span of six hours, and it’s an emotional
rollercoaster—and you are right there with the band the entire time. Berninger
sounds so tired by the end, but yet he, and the rest of The National, just keep
playing, somehow persevering through each time until the very end.
Due to the nature of this set, it obviously limits itself to
an audience—purely for fans of the band—and only the hardest of the hard core
fans of the band at that. It’s not exactly the kind of thing that begs to be
listened to all the time, so I do kind of question the need for a 9xLP set of
it—however, the money from the boxed set goes to a health-related charity, so,
if you have a disposable income, your $150 is going to a worthy cause.
Like the “repeat” button itself, A Lot of Sorrow could be looked at as a novelty, but no matter,
it’s something that needs to be experienced at least once, allowing yourself to
become completely entranced in the myriad variations of one simple pop song
that ends up becoming so much more than that as you are completely engulfed in
in each version’s subtle nuances, and more importantly, its deeper meanings.
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