The National’s ninth album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, is consumed with keeping track: where things diverged, where things were lost, what has been accumulated since. The band is taking stock—sometimes literally. “Eucalyptus” is a breakup anthem in which Matt Berninger spreads out their shared personal effects, pausing every so often to expand the negotiations. (“What about the ornaments? What if I reinvented again?”) During the chorus he makes an offer that is insistently, suspiciously generous: “You should take it/If I miss it, I’ll visit.” The negative accounting continues on the exhausted “Ice Machines,” as Berninger lists everything he can do without (speaker systems, blinking white lights, being perceived). Bryan Devendorf’s drumming is particularly deft, almost sheepishly reticent.
That sort of light touch brushes nearly everything here: In both form and content, this is the National’s gentlest album to date. They’ve been on this trajectory for some time, but Frankenstein goes even further: shedding the prickle and urgency of 2017’s Sleep Well Beast, dropping the conceptual framework of 2019’s artfully orchestrated I Am Easy to Find. Like the latter, Frankenstein has a topflight guest list: Sufjan Stevens, Phoebe Bridgers, Taylor Swift. But only Swift contributes anything beyond vocal coloration. Everyone has their moments—particularly Bridgers, whose harmonies elevate the stately chamber-rock ballad “This Isn’t Helping”—but their presence feels a bit like moral support.
Not to dismiss the power of moral support. It supercharges the hipster reverie “New Order T-Shirt,” which runs sunny fingerpicking under its precise memories: a pack of blue American Spirits on a Russian restaurant table in August 2001, a “Japanese novelty bomb” and the ensuing customs incident. Closing lullaby “Send for Me” is an airy, tender gesture: a ballad that plays like their “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own” or “Fix You.” “If you’re ever sitting at the airport/And you don’t wanna leave,” Berninger dreamily mumbles, “Don’t even know what you’re there for/Send for me.” Still, the project of the National fundamentally differs from that of U2 or Coldplay: Berninger doesn’t offer hope or wholeness, just a simple ride home.
At this point in the National’s career, every sound and lyric perches on the edge of evaporation. They dangle the fantasy of escape but settle for the perpetual transit from city to city, room to room, poolside to poolside. And during all this travel come the nagging questions. “But would your life be so bad/If you knew every single thought I had?” a wounded Berninger asks on “This Isn’t Helping.” There’s an answer, perhaps, on the fidgety doomscroll lament “Tropic Morning News.” “Oh, where’s the brain we shared?” Berninger wonders as he glances up from his phone, mainlining everyone else’s unending urgencies. He admits that staying current can be a kind of stasis: an endless mechanical tapping mirrored by Devendorf’s clipped percussion pad.
