Courtney Barnett and The National
Hill Auditorium // Ann Arbor, MI // June 25th, 2019
Photos by Kendra Petersen Kamp // Review by Jordan Petersen Kamp
“My wife Carin wrote this one. It’s about me though…. Which isn’t a good thing,” offered Matt Berlinger, the vocalist for The National, with a wry smile at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan last Tuesday night. The song he was introducing was “Hey Rosey” off the band’s new album I Am Easy to Find, which is a vague, somewhat dark but ultimately devotional love song— in other words a classically themed song for a band that has made a career out of wrenching a stubborn beauty out of the ugliest of adult feelings. But even in its hardness, there’s a calm, almost relaxing ease to “Hey Rosey.” The song and the album it comes from feels different for the band. And so did the concert.
The very beginning of a concert at a big venue is a weird collision. Seats remain empty, conversations continue and the house lights usually stay up for at least the first few songs— and somehow a transcendent live music experience is supposed to just happen. So of course Courtney Barnett, who opened Tuesday’s show, can make it feel completely natural. The Australian blues-rocker has a looseness on stage that would make Kurt Cobain look uptight. After a brief thank you to the audience for showing up early, she quickly obliterated any awkward transitional space with “Avant Gardner” from her 2013 double EP, A Sea or Split Peas. Even while ripping through extended guitar solos— the most pretentious performance of all— she looked cool and easy. She’s a scrappy guitar player and one of the best in the world and songs like “I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch” and “Small Poppies” could not have possibly sounded any bigger.
Looseness was a helpful foreshadow for The National’s set. The band’s current set-up—which features many touring members, including a second drummer (James McCallister, Sufjan Stevens’ longtime touring band mate) and vocalist Zoe Randell of the folk band Luluc performing the female vocals from I Am Easy To Find— has them feeling closer to the family jam-band a group with two pairs of Deadhead brothers is destined to become. The extra hands, voices and instruments give the new material a bright and blurry current that flits above the band’s characteristically serious indie-rock fastidiousness. This is The National, so any breeziness is graded on a curve— sure, there was a dude wearing tie-dye on stage, but he was also playing a modular synth.
The band’s two hour set touched on their entire career. Highlights from High Violet, Trouble Will Find Me and Sleep Well Beast provided the biggest moments in songs like “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” “Don’t Swallow the Cap,” and “The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness,” all of which show the band at their rowdiest. Softer standouts like Boxer’s “Green Gloves” and Trouble Will Find Me’s “Slow Show” were the most bare and intimate of the night— a reminder that The National was once known for the painstaking refinement and reservation of five individuals. Even the band’s obscure self-titled debut got some love with the inclusion of “Son” on the set list.
But the emphasis was on the new, as 11 of the 16 songs from I Am Easy To Find were performed. The most definitive statements on the album, like the gorgeous “Oblivions” and triumphal “Rylan,” remained definitive live, but other songs molded into different shapes than their recorded versions. “Hey Rosey” was driven by guitar instead of the strings and synths on record, turning it into a slow-grooving rock songs, while the euphoric sprint of “Where is Her Head” sounded even more breathless and frenzied. Across the board, the music is more animated in a live setting, which masks some of the less fresh features of the past two albums (like just how many times they’ve reused the beat from Sleep Well Beast’s “Guilty Party.”)
The unbuttoning The National has undergone in the past few years is most obvious in Berninger. On past tours, he lumbered around the stage with wine in hand, slowly circling the drain of his darkest impulses while confronting them in song. But here he seemed lighter, like how I imagine Jim Morrison might have acted on stage had he lived long enough into the 1970s to link arms with George Harrison and join him on his spiritual enlightenment. Berninger goofed more than he glowered as he bounced around the stage, interacting warmly with the crowd while window-shopping for accessories to take from people in the first row. He eventually settled on a University of Michigan hat from a man in exchange for a signature on his T-shirt.
The last time I saw The National was at a festival they headlined in the summer of 2018 at the tail end of the touring cycle for Sleep Well Beast. The show was fairly labored; the band was fighting sound issues for most of their set and Berninger couldn’t remember the words to several songs. As he slowly unraveled and became more frustrated it seemed as though he were struggling to find a place in his own band. He finally walked off during the encore, leaving the band to finish the final song, “About Today,” instrumentally.
With so many helping hands, that type of isolation doesn’t seem possible on this tour. Last Tuesday, during Randell’s verses when he wasn’t singing, Berninger completely stopped moving and stayed out of the lights illuminating the front of the stage, effectively disappearing into the show’s backdrop.
It was as if he was being enveloped in what The National has become rather than fighting to keep up with who they have been.
