The National’s eighth studio album, I Am Easy to Find, came out of an odd period of relaxation for the band. To hear them tell it, no one really was planning on making an album at first – but after director Mike Mills finished a short film of that title starring Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina), the band found themselves in their pastoral studio in upstate New York, working once again. The band’s process has always had a unique structure to it, perhaps owing to the fact that it is, quite literally, a band of brothers. Aaron and Bryce Dessner play guitars and piano as well as compose the music; Scott and Bryan Devendorf form the rhythm section; and vocalist Matt Berninger is the odd man out, fitting his lyrics to the creations of the rest of the band.
Though I Am Easy to Find is still immediately recognizable as a National record, the band has used this impromptu album cycle to explore more new territory than ever before. Every record The National has released up to this point has been a rather tightly-curated set of tracks, but I Am Easy to Find clocks in at 16 songs and an hour in length. This does track, however, with the trajectory of their previous records. After the resounding success of their breakout hit High Violet, which melded the quiet of Boxer with the raw energy and occasional bombast of Alligator, the band didn’t want to stop evolving.
They first dipped their toes into uncertain waters with the unconventional time signatures of Trouble Will Find Me, and then into more glitchy and electronic territory on Sleep Well Beast, which found trombonist Ben Lanz trading his brass for a wiry table of synths during live performances. That experimental spirit is alive and well and still shape-shifting on I Am Easy to Find, because while both Mills and Berninger have insisted the album is not the soundtrack to the film, its vastness and slower-pace are suggestive of the influence of the film on the album.
As with previous records, Berninger approached writing lyrics as a collaborative project with his wife, Carin Besser. Herself an editor and film producer, Besser’s influence seems even more prevalent here, and she receives sole credit for the lyrics of album opener ‘You Had Your Soul with You’, as well as ‘Hey Rosey’. While The National’s music has always been most alluring to the sadder sect of music listeners, Berninger has maintained in various interviews that despite the lyrical content of his songs, he’s really not any more sad than the average person, and it’s intriguing to know that many of these forlorn relationship songs are actually emerging collaboratively from a married couple.
Berninger’s baritone is as deep and inviting as ever, but the defining trait of I Am Easy to Find is that he shares vocal duty more than ever before. This is an album built almost exclusively around collaborations, and the tracks are flush with guest vocalists including Sharon Van Etten, Kate Stables of This Is the Kit, and most prominently Gail Ann Dorsey, whose beautiful voice and massive range are known to many through both her solo work and collaborations with artists like David Bowie. Berninger, a longtime admirer of Leonard Cohen, can now count himself among the followers of Cohen’s later-career tradition of bringing in female voices to counter and complement his own.
Dorsey opens the record on ‘You Had Your Soul with You’, filling gorgeous string-backed verses between the band’s frantic interplay of guitars and synths, and is a cornerstone throughout the record on standout tracks like the spacious ‘Hairpin Turns’. Stables has many fantastic moments as well, perhaps none more than the elating vocal harmonies of the title track. Often Berninger is happy to let these voices take over completely, and though it’s an unfamiliar sound in the band’s discography, it’s a piquant, appealing, and confident decision. Mina Tindle, wife of Bryce Dessner, has one of the best vocal performances of the whole record, eclipsing Berninger on the shifting chorus of ‘Oblivions’ amid lush strings.
The album benefits greatly from a gorgeous instrumental arrangement. Both Dessner brothers have been active in various orchestral compositions since The National’s rise to indie royalty, and that experience is fully displayed here in the record’s extensive use of strings. ‘Dust Swirls in Strange Light’ also employs the significant talents of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus; this track, the best of the album’s three interludes, features lyrics by Mills rather than Berninger or Besser, with spare drums carrying the listener into an interestingly-syncopated instrumental close that, much like the title track of ‘Sleep Well Beast’, interpolates motifs from elsewhere on the record in an interesting fashion.
Despite the persistent collaborative spirit and the band’s return to orchestral arrangements even more lush than those of High Violet, the band hasn’t wholly abandoned its old playbook either. Tracks like ‘Quiet Light’ showcase the core five-piece’s continued cohesion, in particular the percussion of Bryan Devendorf, whose impeccably-tight drumming has always been the sturdy foundation on which the rest of the band’s songs rest, all the way back to their first record in 2001.
Then there’s ‘Rylan’, a song which has been forming for more than seven years, first surfacing as a potential track for Trouble Will Find Me, then disappearing until the band finally nailed it down for I Am Easy to Find. It’s an instant classic as a result, its sharp percussion and bright piano cutting right to the listener’s heart alongside classic Berninger-isms like “if you want to be alone, then come with me,” and “climb into the ocean”. Stables takes the second verse of the song, her voice tuned to sound a bit like Imogen Heap, adding a haunting and ethereal element to the song. Bryce Dessner’s guitar at the end sounds just like it did on High Violet, so much so that anyone who’s been to a National concert or two is bound to picture Dessner at the lip of the stage with his blue-and-white guitar outstretched in front of him or above his head.
‘Rylan’ forms a particularly strong back half of this record, which ends on ‘Light Years’, a classic Berninger ballad where, tracked by little more than Aaron’s solitary piano to start, he sings most poignantly about loss and solitude within a crowd. It’s the perfect coda to the album, highlighting the raw strength of Berninger’s voice and authorship, and pairing it with the delicate, evocative strings and backing vocals that make up the strongest tethers in this record.
The National have been at it for two full decades, and I Am Easy to Find exemplifies both the enduring strength of their five-man family, as well as the benefits of ceding the spotlight to new voices.
Review by Collin Heroux