Pitchfork乐评 | Sleep Well Beast - The National

The National乐队为他们的第七张专辑平添几分嘈杂，亦不失其庄重。整张专辑充满疏离与沉思，正如主唱Matt Berninger所唱的那样：这张专辑并非关于如何享受生活，而是如何熬过生活。

文/Jayson Greene

译/语非

Here’s a handy tag cloud of adjectives the National have no doubt grown to despise: Restrained, controlled, intimate, slow-burning, patient, grand. No doubt, too, that their live shows can feel like frantic exorcisms of all of these respectable, middlebrow signifiers: Onstage, Matt Berninger is a kind of yuppie Dionysus, downing bottles of red wine, tearing at his collar, pushing through the crowd, shouting off-mic. The contrast between the two versions of himself, the staid crooner and the wild-eyed rocker, felt like the band’s ace in the hole: It meant they could play stadiums and soundtrack scenes of snow falling in sedate indie films about unhappy New England families.

The National乐队想必已经厌倦了被贴上诸如“矜持”、“克制”、“私人”、“慢热”、“隐忍”、“恢弘”这一类标签，对于这些看似体面实则平庸的观众而言，他们的现场表演疯狂程度堪比驱魔。舞台上的Matt Berninger仿佛雅痞式的酒神：大口灌下葡萄酒，撕扯衣领，推搡人群，冲话筒嘶吼。主唱这两种截然不同的印象——沉稳的低音域歌手和愤怒的摇滚歌手——已成为乐队的招牌，这意味着他们能为那些以新英格兰区阴郁的家庭生活为主题的雪花屏式独立电影制作配乐，也可以来一场体育场摇滚。

Sleep Well Beast is their seventh album, and their first attempt at inviting some of that disruptive energy into the studio. Making records with this band has sometimes sounded about as fun as a forced-bonding office retreat, but this time they built a studio in a pastoral area of upstate New York that muted intraband creative friction. As Berninger memorably put it, “It’s hard to be a dick when you look out the window and there’s this tranquil pond.” As a result, Sleep Well Beast quakes and shivers with all kinds of un-National sounds—barbed, intentionally sloppy guitar attacks, drum loops, bits of digital crunch and splatter, and a rawer, more abandoned performance from Berninger. They don’t reinvent the band’s image so much as carefully muss its hair a bit, unfasten one more button on its shirt collar. They are still a good dinner-party band, but now they’ve made the album for when the wine starts spilling on the rug, the tablecloth is rumpled, the music has imperceptibly gotten louder, and all those friendly conversations have turned a little too heated.

Sleep Well Beast是The National的第七张专辑，也是乐队首次在录音室作品中展露一定的爆破力。与The National乐队录音有趣之处在于，仿佛在办公室内做冥想，但这一次他们在纽约州北部的一处田园牧歌式的场地建了一座录音室。Matt Berninger对此说道：“当你望向窗外，凝视平静的湖面，你就很难再犯浑了。” 于是，专辑带来了听起来不那么“National”的音乐：尖利、蓄意又懒散的击弦和鼓段，还有吱吱作响的电子乐做点缀，以及主唱更粗糙、更肆意的表演。乐队并没有重塑之前的造型，只是精心地把发型弄得更乱一点，多解开一枚衬衫纽扣。他们依然是一支很棒的晚宴式乐队，但这张专辑看听起来像是把酒洒在地毯上、把桌布揉得一团糟，乐声不经意间变得响亮，所有友善的交谈也带了点火药味。

The first single “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness” was a bit of a shot across the bow. The song introduces itself with a series of stray-hair noises—a steely guitar line, a frosty choir of “oohing” voices, a boxy drum loop, and an imperious grand piano airlifted from U2’s “New Year’s Day.” It forms an intriguing mist, but as you squint into it, familiar shapes emerge: The major-key chorus arrives with the same effortlessness as all their best songs, with that glinting phalanx of horns pushing it quietly forward. These are National Songs, made with the sounds and feelings that should be poured into the making of a National album. Some of the eccentricities and raw touches left at the edges feel like wind resistance tacked onto a beveled-smooth vehicle after the fact.

纵观整张专辑，先行单曲“The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness”足以成为打榜单曲。这首歌以其律动的噪音、钢铁质感的吉他声线、冷冰冰的和声、沉闷的鼓段以及一段蛮横又富有气势的钢琴（令人不禁想起U2乐队的“New Year's Day”）作为前奏，恍如一团迷雾，但当你细听，熟悉的声音渐次而起：副歌如期而至，如方阵般齐整的小号带来了一点明亮。这就是The National的音乐，所制作的声音、所倾注的情感成就了一张“National”的专辑。这种古怪又粗粝的质感有如机身光滑的机车平添了几处刮痕。

The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness

The National

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The same trick happens at the beginning of “I’ll Still Destroy You”: With a fluttering piece of drum programming and some mallet percussion, we are given a convincing twenty-second impression of a Bjork song, circa Homogenic maybe. Then the swaying chords, the murmuring piano, and Berninger’s rumbling voice enters, dispelling the illusion and planting us back in the dimly lit auditorium on the cover of Boxer. The song kicks up again on its way out, with a wild, chaotic build that careens directly into “Guilty Party.” These controlled breakouts, bookending the otherwise-dependable pleasures of their music, provide a neat analog for the bits of craven irresponsibility and abandon you cling to in the margins of an otherwise stable existence—the occasional 2am-Tuesday, the weekend away from the kids. This has always been, and remains, Berninger’s character: “Let’s just get high enough to see our problems,” he pleads on “Day I Die.”

这在单曲“I'll Still Destroy You”的前奏里有迹可循：浮动的鼓编曲和木槌敲击，给我们一种长达20秒的错觉，仿佛是一首Björk的歌（类似于专辑Homogenic）。随后是催人摇摆的和声，低沉的钢琴，随着主唱低沉的人声加入进来，勾起我们对前作Boxer封面里灯火幽暗的礼堂的印象，旋即被一扫而光。同样地，当曲目收束时，以其嘈杂粗粝直接过渡到下一单曲“Guilty Party”。这些不失克制的情绪爆发，以及音乐中令人踏实的愉悦感，简练地还原出软弱、失责又已成常态的生活：诸如凌晨两点偶尔的失眠，摆脱掉子女束缚的周末时光，而这正是Matt Berninger的真实写照。正如单曲“Day I Die”所唱的那样：“就让我们嗨翻天直到面对我们的过错为止”。

The wildest he allows himself to be, and maybe the wildest the band’s ever sounded, is “Turtleneck,” a mid-album cut that veers startlingly close to “National rave-up.” Berninger pitches his vocals at a ragged shout. It's a political rocker, sardonic and full of withering asides like, “Light the water, check for lead.” “The poor, they leave their cell phones in the bathrooms of the rich,” he mutters, a lyric he’s explained refers to Trump venting typo-ridden tweets to the nation from his toilet-bowl throne. The song melts open into a pair of squealing, squiggled guitar solos that wouldn’t feel out of place on a latter-day Pearl Jam album, and Berninger moves in fitful circles around the kind of earnest activism that Vedder has practiced for years.

当Matt Berninger达到最狂野的状态，乐队也演奏出了他们最狂野的单曲，“Turtleneck”——专辑基调直接转向了“National”式的咆哮。我们听到了主唱声带颤抖的怒吼，这位政治摇滚歌手用其充满讽刺的口吻唱到：“点燃水面/检查领导”“穷人把他们的手机落在了富人的厕所”。他解释道这些歌词指的就是川普，一个坐在马桶上愤怒地向全国人民发送荒诞无稽的推特的总统。这首歌融入了扭曲的、尖叫的吉他独奏，即便放到Pearl Jam乐队的后期专辑里也没有显得不合时宜，Matt Berninger所表现出的激进主义倾向已被Eddie Vedder（Pearl Jam乐队主唱）践行多年。

Turtleneck

The National

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Like Vedder, or James Murphy, or really any rock singer wringing drama from their own limitations, Berninger remains the marquee character in the National’s music. He’s the guy the spotlight follows, and the band—as limber and powerful as the Dessner and Devendorf brothers are—serve mostly just to set the scene for Berninger to mutter intelligent, self-deprecating things into strange and counterintuitive rhythmic pockets of the songs. He wrote a lot of these lyrics alongside his wife Carin Besser and possesses an unerring ability to zero in on the bits of conversation that signify a lifelong coupledom: “I only take up a little of the collapsing space/I better cut this off, don’t want to fuck it up,” he repeats to himself on “Walk It Back,” a pitch-perfect evocation of trying to talk yourself out of having the same fight with the same person again, likely with the same results. “You keep saying so many things that I wish you won’t,” from “Empire Line,” is a sort of “I-don’t-want the-kids-to-hear-us” version of “shut up, goddamnit,” the version you offer when years of mutual respect have supplied the brakes to your worst impulses.

正如Eddie Vedder、James Murphy（LCD Soundsystem乐队主创）这些突破个人极限写出愁惨作品的摇滚歌手一样，Matt Berninger在乐队中独树一帜。他是聚光灯的焦点，整个乐队（Dessner与Devendorf两组兄弟档：吉他手Aaron Dessner、制作人Bryce Dessner、贝斯手Scott Devendorf、鼓手Bryan Devendorf）也为他智慧且自谦的唱词制造出奇异诡谲、有反直觉的音乐。他与妻子Carin Besser一同创作了大部分歌词，他也一语道破终生伴侣关系的微妙之处，并在单曲“Walk It Back”中喃喃自语道：“我只是占据了一席塌陷之地/想做个了断，不能一团糟”，用一种招魂式的语调试图与自己进行一番长谈，不愿纠结于与伴侣反复争吵但无济于事的处境。在单曲“Empire Line”中出现了这样的歌词：“你一直说着那些我希望你未曾说出口的东西”，就比如“我——不想——让我们的——孩子——听到这些！”，实际上这无异于说出“快他妈闭嘴吧”，不过出于多年来的互相尊重，他给自己的一时冲动来了一个急刹车。

But perhaps the most resonant lyrics here speak to the band’s persistence and the durability of any long-term union. “Nothing I do/Makes me feel different,” he confesses on “I’ll Still Destroy You.” “Forget it/Nothing I change changes anything,” he offers on “Walk It Back.” Like R.E.M., whose ongoing existence became its own kind of raison d’être as they aged, the National offer testimony to something we don’t often celebrate: Enduring is a superpower of its own. The fact that no one can talk about the National without invoking their dependability might feel a bit unfair to them, or at least a bit tired. And yet, there’s a reason it remains such a dominating lens through which to examine them. Consistency is not boring. Consistency is a miracle, a small act of defiance against entropy. Berninger has compared the band to a marriage, as all band members do, but their music feels particularly devoted to the quotidian nature of lifelong unions, the way that your success is measured in time, how each year together turns your commitment into its own kind of monument. There’s a reason anniversary cards say things like “All these years later, I still love you.” It’s because the miracle isn’t in the “love,” it’s in the “still.”

也许最能引起听众共鸣的歌词是有关乐队以及任何长期关系中的双方共存与相互忍耐。Matt Berninger在单曲“I'll Still Destroy You”中坦言：“我无所作为/我有所不同”，或者是在单曲“Walk It Back”中唱的那样：“忘了吧，我什么也改变不了”，正如R.E.M.乐队的同名单曲“Walk It Back”，生活永无休止，也给了他们衰老的理由。The National乐队却为那些平日里不值得庆贺的东西坦白了心声：忍受本身就是一种力量。许多人谈及The National乐队必称赞其“沉稳”（dependability），这对乐队来说是不公平的，至少是厌倦的。但“沉稳”并不令人厌倦，“沉稳”是一个奇迹，是反熵的行为。像所有乐队成员一样，Matt Berninger也将乐队比作一场婚姻，不同的是The National乐队的音乐着重表现长期关系中平凡生活的本质：你成功的程度以时间来衡量，共同相处的漫长岁月是怎样将你的奉献铸成丰碑。这就是为什么婚姻周年纪念卡片上总是印着类似“这么多年过去了，我依然爱你”字样的原因，因为“爱”不是奇迹，“依然”才是。

Sleep Well Beast

The National

（公众号：译甸之园）

-列御寇

“去吧，但愿你一路平安 桥都坚固，隧道都光明。”

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