six drinks in

high violet drops today. gonna pick up the LP at good records tonight. i lost my copy of the boxer so i might cop that too. when i first heard them 5 years ago or whenever, i didn't get it. i was in my mid-20's and i didn't "get" anything. it was all pink shoes and japanese girls and sparks and other peoples' money. i didn't know how much i didn't know. it wasn't until recently when i started working and boozing and aching and failing and beating my fucking head against the wall that i could understand where these guys were coming from. i guess that's life after 25; "...when the weight of adulthood begins to crowd out the emptiness of prolonged adolescence." i'll drink to that.

seems like i unintentionally grew into the life they're writing about. p4k on high violet:

"The characters in National songs have real jobs, have uninteresting sex, get drunk, and lie to one another. They do so during the regular course of a workaday week, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The National aren't "dad-rock" so much as "men's magazine rock": music chiefly interested in the complications of being a stable person expected to own certain things and dress certain ways.

On the National's fifth album, High Violet, those constraints are starting to wear on them, which makes a lot of sense: they wear on most people. In between patches of obtuse imagery, singer Matt Berninger sounds increasingly self-destructive. The record's upbeat numbers don't cheer him up so much as commiserate with him. All of this makes High Violet a dark affair, even for a band with a reputation for sad-bastard melodrama. The National have never sounded triumphant, but they can still be reassuring, with Berninger's lyrics acting as salves for our own neuroses. Six drinks in, tired of your coworkers, wishing you could just go home and laugh at sitcoms with someone? Maybe get laid?"

yeah.