★★★★★
I have begun to reassess the way I think about good music. In part, this is due to my love affair with Trouble Will Find Me, the latest studio album from indie-rock band, The National. First and foremost, I have come to realise that there are bands which defy their genre. In some ways, they defy their music. A good album is something that is vital: it challenges you, it makes you vulnerable. It is also the kind of album which can never truly be understood...
- www.musicreview.co.za
2013-12-06
★★★★★
In an ocean of anonymity, where one band sounds like ten others, The National stands firm atop its own island. Matt Berninger's smooth-as-chocolate baritone is as distinctive as Leonard Cohen's and equally as affecting. It's his voice, even more so than his melancholic lyrics or the sadcore tone of the music, that elevates the midwestern band above the average depression set to music...
- www.ink19.com
2013-06-17
★★★★★
When The National took their first stumbled steps towards greater notoriety on their 2003 album Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, it was as a band whose songs featured characters struggling through the darker side of domestic bliss. Whether that be the alcohol-addled crux of 'Slipping Husband' or the marital meanderers of 'Trophy Wife', the group's frontman - and dominant lyricist - Matt Berninger has always strove to peep behind suburbia's blackout curtains...
- www.thelineofbestfit.com
2013-06-11
★★★★★
????? With The National's last release High Violet, mid-life dread was floating everywhere; it was the perfect "hip white people's problems" disk. The band apparently scrapped thousands of hours of music to get the right sonic tone and texture and in that department there are few (if any) indie bands that can rival them (Spoon and Radiohead come to mind). Trouble Will Find Me gives way to a little bit of a lighter feeling...
- www.glidemagazine.com
2013-06-27
★★★★★
7
Critical Mass
Release Date: May 21, 2013Label: 4AD
Matt Berninger and Aaron Dessner of The National / Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Anatomies of melancholy in modern music rarely come with skeletons as complete as the National's. Their audience continues to expand -- hell, I heard "Fake Empire" in a Publix supermarket two months after its 2007 release...
- www.spin.com
2013-06-06
★★★★★
Following up 2010's critically and commercially acclaimed album High Violet, Trouble Will Find Me is alt rock underdogs The National's sixth studio album, and what an album it is.
A few factors make this album feel remarkably confident; the bands' collective insecurities that diminished with the success of High Violet, which in turn inspired new songs despite the band's plan for a break from music and finally, that Matt Berninger and Aaron Dessner had recently become parents...
- www.undertheradar.co.nz
2013-06-26
★★★★★
From the opening moments where Matt Berninger morosely wonders if he should be living in salt for leaving his lover, you know this album is going to tick all the boxes that make this, unmistakably, an album by The National. Another couple of boxes are soon ticked when Jennifer and Jenny are added to the ever-growing list of Berninger's women-on-pedestals. To accompany the band's unmistakable sound, Berninger continues to explore his feelings of alienation, anxiety and displacement...
- www.beat.com.au
2013-06-04
★★★★★
Ohio natives The National are back with their sixth album, and are set to continue on the upward trajectory that they have been on since the release of their 2001 debut. With each album they have grown and honed their song-writing talents, so far peaking with 2010's High Violet, but the self-produced Trouble Will Find Me looks set to take the band's reputation even further...
- www.theaureview.com
2013-06-03
★★★★★
Brooklyn quintet's sad and uplifting sixth... The National's path to fame has been taken by increment. When they debuted back in 2001 with their self-titled record on Brassland, a label founded for such purpose by the band's twin sibling guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner, their vaguely alt.country-ish songs felt of small and intimate dimensions, expressions of sore-headed introspection just large enough to fill a glass a few times before the barman called time...
- www.uncut.co.uk
2013-05-31
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