“This one’s for the Buffalo Bar,” toasts Matt Berninger, hailing the tiny Islington basement club pegged for closure, clearly a man who knows the power and impact of close-up, in-your-face emotional rock music. And how we dearly wish we were there with him now. Ohio’s the National thrived for a decade in dive bars and theatres, their songs tense fusions of the urgent and the languid, the private and the profound, enrapturing audiences convinced that they were at a musical poetry reading going beautifully and violently wrong. In such rooms, Berninger was a riveting and disruptive presence, an unkempt literature professor swigging from bottles of zinfandel and muttering sordid baritone confessionals like the indie rock Dylan Moran, before having one glug too many and ploughing into the crowd for Mr November, mic lead for a garrote, yowling like a presidential candidate gone feral.
But with the breakthrough successes of recent albums High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me this intimate alt-rock seminar has got way too big. From the teetering black run of the O2 gods, it’s clear the National can’t fully own such a cavern. Their melodies are too subterranean, their details too indistinct, their aesthetic too swampy. Offbeat beauties like I Should Live in Salt or the louche limbo of Demons are lost to the rafters, while the more billowing reverbs of Hard to Find or Slow Show come on like a mumbling Coldplay, lacking the clarity and clout of the big arena moment. The propulsive rush of their best song Bloodbuzz Ohio, thrown away early, barely registers a pulse and when Berninger yells “I was afraid I’d eat your brains, ‘cause I’m evil!” on Conversation 16, he sounds about as malevolent as Richard from Pointless.
The presence of alt-folk hero Sufjan Stevens and some Beirut-style horn flourishes add a certain grace to proceedings, but for over an hour the National flounder, coming alive only when Berninger succumbs to the feverish paranoia of Afraid of Everyone or the murderous mania of Abel, a fratricidal howl dedicated, worryingly, to his brother who “is 35 and should move out of my garage”.
Requesting tequila shots to help them through yet another rendition of Sorrow, the song they played 105 times straight at the Museum of Modern Art last May, a string of affecting ballads finally unite the room. The cocktail lounge lament of Pink Rabbits gives way to the iPad-flogging loveliness of England and the mood is set for Berninger’s trademark encore freakout, smashing his microphone on the stage during Mr November and rampaging through the crowd for Terrible Love. Rounded with a communal acoustic sing-along of Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks, it’s a rousing finale to an otherwise underwhelming two hours. The Buffalo Bar misses their close-up magic.
• 27 November. Box office: 0113 275 2411. Venue: Brudenell Social Club, Leeds;
then 28 November, Tolbooth, Stirling. Box office: 01786 274000.
