Description
With new voices, new avenues of exploration and new lyrical viewpoints, The National – alongside producer-director Mike Mills – once again show their ability to reinvent themselves to produce something that is more than just an album. Their 8th one in a 20-year career, it is a collective effort, with over 70 guest musicians and several female vocalists joining the project.
At 64 minutes, I Am Easy To Find is also the National’s longest album, providing room to luxuriate and admire all these guest voices as the art pieces they are, while getting sucked into unhurried treasures like “Quiet Light” and “Oblivions,” both among the band’s most weightless and sublime. The National have never been afraid to dial things down, but it’s rarely sounded as vulnerable as it does here – song after song, guitarist Bryce Dessner’s vibrant, moody arrangements serve to reflect lead vocalist Matt Berninger’s precarious balance of hope and frustration.
A record imbued with the distance between people and places, the impermanence of stories and emotions, and one that finds it ever so hard to stay in one place for too long, I Am Easy To Find feels like a restart for a band in its 20th year. It proves that the National are not the band you thought they were. They’re way more than that.
