The National • I Am Easy to Find
 ith
just over two decades of successful touring under their belts and considerable gray in
their collective 40-something beards, the members of The National are either revered as
innovative indie music heroes or dismissed as pretentious purveyors of "dad
rock." I Am Easy To Find, the Cincinnati, Ohio, band’s eighth studio
album and collaboration with movie director Mike Mills, is likely to calcify further those
predictable positions, but open-minded music lovers should give this ambitious double
album a little extra time on their turntables. And that’s not because the music is
inaccessible. In fact, I Am Easy To Find is rife with musical hooks and catchy
lyrics. But it’s also a densely packed 64-minute epic whose sprawling cast of
contributing musicians, writers and performers simply can’t be fully digested in one
sitting. Its intricate production, strategic pacing and careful visual design enable I
Am Easy To Find to function both as a movie soundtrack and a fully formed concept
album.
I Am Easy To Find began as an unsolicited e-mail from movie director Mike Mills (20th Century Women, Thumbsucker) to The National’s chief lyricist and lead singer Matt Berninger. The two men had never met and were surprised to discover that they had been longtime fans of each other’s work. Mills’s open-ended proposal was that he and the band should simply “create something” together. Berninger’s response was to hand over full access to the tracks from a variety of songs the band was in the process of recording. Mills then deconstructed “the stems” (as he calls them) from those songs, used them as inspiration and subsequently reconstituted them as the soundtrack for a 25-minute film starring Swedish actress Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina). Watching Mills’s film on YouTube before listening to the album is not required, but I felt my initial reaction to the album would’ve been enhanced had I done that. It’s also worth noting that the movie was played for an audience prior to the band’s first full performance of the completed album. I Am Easy To Find presents the entire arc of a woman’s life from infancy to death. In the film, Vikander was denied the use of aging makeup or prosthetics and forced to rely solely on her facial expressions and body language to convey the passage of time and the impact of life’s curveballs. While the first five minutes are a bit artsy and contrived, the film’s sparse sets, deft use of subtitles and silvery black-and-white photography eventually serve to focus the attention squarely on the album’s emotion-laden themes of birth, love, and death. Like a great short story, I Am Easy To Find offers its audience a portal into the thoughts and experiences of the work’s central characters. This is made possible by the band’s decision to enlist an impressive array of female singers. Among the strongest of those is Gail Ann Dorsey, David Bowie’s longtime bassist and vocal accompanist. Dorsey’s smooth, burnished alto meshes perfectly with Berninger’s rougher-hewn Leonard Cohen-esque baritone on “Roman Holiday.” By contrast, French folk singer Mina Tindal’s sweeter upper register is the ideal conduit for the woman’s perspective on “Oblivions,” a meditation about the expectations and tensions of a marriage that Berninger penned with his wife and fellow lyricist Carin Besser. This approach stumbles a bit on “The Pull of You” when Sharon Van Etten and Berninger engage in some awkward talk-singing dialogue, but the rest of the album’s compositions do a masterful job of dramatizing slices of real life. The lush backdrop of a huge orchestral ensemble, complex rhythms, synth sequences, layered guitar textures and the striking use of the Brooklyn Youth Choir all lend the complexity and scope the album's existential themes deserve. While the 16-bit/44.1kHz stream of I Am Easy To Find on Tidal and Qobuz is characterized by less digital sheen than any of the band’s previous albums, the vinyl release is even more relaxed and inviting. For example, on “Roman Holiday,” voices are well delineated and Bryan Devendorf’s tom-tom work has depth and resonance that the streaming versions render as somewhat brittle. The same is true on the album’s anthemic opening track. Devendorf’s kick drum and his brother Scott’s bass lines jump more energetically from the grooves of the vinyl. Vocals, which are central to this album’s charms, have more three-dimensional presence on the vinyl version than they do when heard via the Tidal or Qobuz streams. While the CD I borrowed sounds a bit smoother and
exhibits better dynamics than the digital streams, the vinyl’s warmth and relaxed
presentation make this an hour-plus sonic journey you can take without fear of listening
fatigue. Mastered by Greg Calbi with Steve Fallone at Sterling Sound, the album possesses
packaging that matches the project’s scale. Everything from the raised
texture of the cover’s paint strokes to the 22 pages of liner notes, the flat and
quiet 180-gram vinyl and the sturdy title-embossed vinyl pouch that encases the gatefold
drips with quality. It will be challenging to find better bang for your new-vinyl buck. |
