Kevin Bronson on August 13th, 2013

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By Gabriel Jones

Matt Berninger has an impressively long microphone cord, as the audience learned at the National’s show Saturday night at the Greek Theatre.

The band’s frontman has made a decent living for some years now straddling the fault line between ego and id. In concert, he’s the model of elegance and civility, dressed in spectacles and a three-piece suit while prowling the stage like a caged tiger and screaming like a banshee. In his songs, his voice takes on the role of guilty conscience in the hangover from the wreckage left behind by the animals we sometimes become. He even remarked on his occasional tendency toward destructiveness – noting the beauty of the Greek, Berninger half-joked that they were playing there because they’d been banned from the Hollywood Bowl.

• ||| Photos by Laurie Scavo

(Berninger: “We played the bowl a few years ago – I smashed some stuff and we’re not allowed back.” Aaron Dessner: “This is the first I’m hearing of this.” Berninger: “It’s true. And we had to pay $10,000.” Dessner: “I never heard this before.” Berninger: “We didn’t tell you because we knew how mad you’d be.”).

And by the second song of Saturday night’s encore, “Mr. November,” Berninger was running wild-eyed through the audience and screaming out his lines, stagehands frantically feeding out the mike cord as he went deeper and deeper into the crowd, and often the only way you could figure out exactly where he was was from the scrum of cell phone cameras flashing around him.

The National is that rare band that’s found the sweet spot shared by adult contemporary and indie/alternative without losing credibility with either group, in large part because they’re able to effectively explore the flip side to happiness that both implicitly feel – the disappointments of adulthood, the despair of getting what you thought you wanted, the wolf in sheep’s clothing that love often turns out to be, the gulf between our desire and emotions and the limited and primitive tools we have available to express them to others. And as it’s grown and matured over the past decade, the National offers a powerful example of where masculinity’s at now, something that many musical artists are still sorting out, balancing strength and fragility while being honest about both.

In “Mr. November,” from 2005’s “Alligator,” the band’s breakthrough album and their first gold record, Berninger evokes the image of being on the cusp of success if only he can pull this one off (“The English [presumably Beggars Banquet, the band’s British record label] are waiting and I don’t know what to do”), trying to talk himself into confidence (“I won’t fuck us over!/I’m Mr. November!”). Now in their late 30s to early 40s, a string of successful albums behind them, including their latest, “Trouble Will Find Me,” (which reached No. 3 on the U.S. Billboard chart, the band now has a mature, relaxed confidence about it in concert, knowing exactly what it’s capable of doing and doing it with consummate professionalism.

Or, almost. While the rest of the band – brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Scott and Bryan Devendorf – is as tight, polished, and skilled musically as any band in the world right now, Berninger, as he often does live, struggled at times Saturday night to hit the right note or the right timbre, but then when you’re trying to cover roughly the range between Tibetan monk chant and Black Francis scream you deserve a little slack. And it ends up making him even more endearing and effective as a front man: Here’s a human being giving everything he’s got, knowing it’s both too much and not enough, and it’s all the more powerful because of it. In the end Berninger’s approach live is always to swing for the bleachers, usually ending up with a double or triple in a cloud of dust, with the band driving him home.

And that’s not to say there weren’t moments of absolute transcendence. In ‘This Is the Last Time’ from ‘Trouble Will Find Me,’ his voice was as warm, robust, and anguished as it’s ever been, even more powerful than on the record and somehow evoking the pain of every failed relationship of every person in the audience. And the evening’s closer, an acoustic sing-along version of “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks,” was a joyous catharsis as the entire crowd joined Berninger in singing over and over “All the very best of us string ourselves up for love …”

The set was preceded by a trailer from Berninger’s brother Tom’s documentary on the band, “Mistaken for Strangers,”‘ which is currently on the festival circuit and looks like all sorts of fun.

North London band Daughter, the National’s labelmates on 4AD, opened the evening with a set that was all atmosphere and soundscape, inspired by the Icelandic sprawl of Sigur Rós and Björk. Singer and bassist Elena Tonra, who initially started the band as a solo project, even sounds like a triangulation of Björk, Of Monsters and Men’s Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir, and (ok, non-Icelander) Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, and guitarist Igor Haefeli even takes after Jónsi in occasionally playing with a violin bow.

Daughter often sounds like an ethereal Florence and the Machine mixed with Washed Out mixed with The xx. Tonra sings with a rare combination of vulnerability and defiance – she allowed herself a rare smile when fans cheered at the opening notes of their most well-known song, ”˜Youth’ (“We’re setting fire to our insides for fun”) from their 2011 EP “The Wild Youth” – and their songs, heavily textured with Haefeli’s swirling guitars, build slowly from The xx’s slowly, carefully constructed tensions to the ecstatic explosions of early Coldplay. Worth watching as they grow, and worth seeing at October’s show at the Wiltern.