Well, let’s put it this way: On a superficial level, Trouble Will Find Me, the National’s latest full-length LP, probably won’t convert any listeners who’ve written off the band’s music as boring. Save for “Graceless,” the closest thing to a “Bloodbuzz Ohio” this time around, the album’s hooks are buried deep within its echoey recesses, only emerging after repeated listens. Ballads like “Pink Rabbits” and “Fireproof” burn slowly, unfurling beneath thin layers of guitar and piano. Lead single “Demons” recalls David Bowie, contorted through an uncommon 7/4 time signature. As always, the National’s two bands of brothers—twins Aaron and Bryce Dessner on guitars and keyboards, and Scott and Bryan Devendorf on bass and drums—play key roles in shaping the album’s cathartic moments. The cinematic swells of “This Is The Last Time” offer just as much satisfaction as the chameleonic “Heavenfaced,” thanks to the instrumentalists’ careful attention to lines of tension.
 
Of course, the power’s in the poetics, and Berninger concocts some truly heart-wrenching images this time around. “Oh, don’t tell anyone I’m here,” he croons on “This Is The Last Time,” a dual ode to love and addiction. “I’ve got Tylenol and Beer,” he sings. It’s visceral suburban escapism at its finest—the 21st-century solution to heartbreak, to the girl whose love is “like a swamp.” Even the fond memories have a dark side; the wistful narrator of “I Need My Girl,” longs for the time when his beloved “lost [her] shit and/Drove the car into the garden.” Yep, it’s pretty sorrowful lyrical fare, but when Berninger’s words are propped up against the light-flecked soundscapes—all breathing room and shimmering guitars—they take on a sculptural presence of their own, and even the deepest sadness appears transcendent. And it’s that transcendence that’s at the heart of Trouble Will Find Me—a little bit of optimism, hidden in the darkness.

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And what tormented souls they are. Rage, lust, sorrow, fear—the entire cathartic spectrum comes out in full force on Silence Yourself, and with tremendous volume. Not that you’d know it from the start, since the album opens with false calm: an excerpt from John Cassavetes’ 1977 film, Opening Night. But then “Shut Up” kicks in with a perfect post-punk storm of hissing cymbals, wiry, Gang of Four-reminiscent bass, and above it all, singer Jehnny Beth’s distinct howl. There’s no doubt that Savages’ instrumental playbook derives plenty of inspiration from the British post-punk canon—Siouxsie And The Banshees and the Pop Group come to mind—but cuts like “City’s Full” and “She Will” sound decidedly modern, crackling with gristle and gloss.
 
While frontwoman Jehnny Beth’s theatrics take up most of the listener’s attention, it’s the rhythmic duo of drummer Fay Milton and bassist Ayse Hassan that keeps the band on track. The chasmic spaces created through their percussion enable tension to build exponentially, like on the now year-old classic “Husbands,” which oscillates between furtive verse and frothing chorus under the direction of Beth’s feverish chants. Elsewhere, they create lazier grooves: “Strife” swoops and sweeps like Blüe Oyster Cult, while “Waiting For A Sign” lumbers along with a menacing scowl.
 
Such musical fortitude would fall flat were it not for Beth’s bold lyricism. As you can tell from the song titles—“Shut Up,” “I Am Here,” “Hit Me”—she’s not afraid to stand up to her detractors, and indeed, many of the songs on Silence Yourself center around reclamation of agency: sexual, idealistic, corporal, you name it. “She Will” just might be the most sinister sex-positivity anthem in existence, describing a woman dead-set on rebelling against the paradigms assigned to her by her gender, who will “get hooked on loving hard/ forcing the slut out,” whether you like it or not. Haunting closer “Marshal Dear,” from whose chorus the album’s title is derived, speaks to greater political unrest: “There are suicides in every dreams,” Beth coos, later remarking, “Crowds grow crazy and fire/Oh Marshal Dear/Can’t you see we’re losing?” The furious squawk of a clarinet rises above the calm, as if to echo the dissent.
 
Think back, if you will, to those dark, dark days, before Al Gore invented the series of tubes that we would subsequently refer to as the Internet, as our communicative framework, as our lives. Considering how the Apple empire holds more cultural sway nowadays than many small nations, such an era can be hard to imagine, but there was once a time when we weren’t so damn distracted. Once upon a time, not too long ago, we could put on a record, or a cassette, or a CD—heck, even a playlist—and lose ourselves in the music, and comfortably tell ourselves, “This is enough.” Savages is a band determined to deliver that type of satiation, even if it means dragging us kicking and screaming away from our cocoon of connectivity. Sometimes, silencing ourselves—even for just 11 tracks and 39 minutes—is just what we need to be free.

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Stop worrying, and just listen to the first single. “Bruane Brenn” is an enthralling tug-of-war between snotty thrash and bigger, dumber Chili Peppers-style rock, centered around a glammy guitar solo. These types of melodic intricacies could be heard on the last album in songs like “Liktorn,” but Ballou sharpens the contrast more noticeably this time around, making the guitars more potent and the vocals more organic. The other immediately noticeable difference is the role to which arena-ready anthemics influence the proceedings: Many of the album’s more propulsive tracks, such as “Spring Fra Livet” (which recalls Foo Fighters’ “Learn To Fly,” as performed by a grindcore band) and the cocky “Evig Vandrar,” constantly strive for the giddy, brutal sugar-highs of the choruses, book-ending them between robust guitar harmonies. It’s a similar approach to the one the sludge lords in Baroness took last summer with the widely praised Yellow And Green, an album which abandoned the bleak, leaden soundscapes that had become commonplace in the genre and, rather than blowing them to bits, just breathed a bit of life into them.
 
Lest we get too kum-ba-yah about the changes, it bears reminding that Kvelertak’s name comes from the Norwegian word for “chokehold,” and they aren’t tapping out when it comes to the punk aggression. Meir contains some of the rowdiest, most ambitious stuff the band’s ever released. The Middle Eastern-tinged solo that snakes in halfway through the d-beat tantrum of “Snilepisk” (Finger cymbals? In my metal?) incorporates a welcome element of surprise into an otherwise standard (but good) hardcore song. The album’s longer, six-minute-and-over songs—which are all, inexplicably, crammed into the second half—come rigged with unexpected blasts of noise: the Guitar Hero-crazy solos that sprout up in “Manelyst” are only topped by “Nekrokosmos”‘ coupling of spooky chants and seismic breakdowns. Trust me on this: Listen to this album with headphones, and your ears will get sore after a while. Kvelertak takes the “black” in black ‘n’ roll very seriously, and Meir‘s technical work, reminiscent to that of Zyklon or Emperor, reflects the band’s life-long love for Norwegian metal.
 
There were a lot of ways that Kvelertak could have let us down with this LP—by growing too accustomed to the standard punk formatting, by restraining the youthful abandon that made them such a revelation in the first place, by getting Chad Kroeger to translate the lyrics. Thankfully, they don’t: They expand upon the thrills of the last record with acerbic aplomb, catching us unaware with hooks and then relentlessly, lovingly, plugging away at the daily, death-y grind.

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But more so than their caustic riffs, the Men’s calling cards are their melodies: simple, warm and delivered with just enough of a raspy edge to avoid being too soft. In this respect, the Americana route actually fits reasonably well within the band’s methodology—free of all the noise, the hooks are crisper and more immediate. The first half of the record is chock-full of Jayhawks-esque jams, rife with mandolin and subtle harmonies. “Half Angel Half Light,” the twangy second track, is a delightful taste of fuzz-pop that would undeniably have made for a better opener; it offers up the rustic touches without the overwrought rural cliches. The heartland rock reaches its apex with “I Saw Her Face,” the album’s de facto “jam song.” Though closer “Supermoon” is longer, at eight minutes, it never hits the cathartic highs of its earlier neighbor.
 
At around the halfway point, with the pummeling post-punk of “The Brass,” the Men begin to slip out of their pastoral trance and, in a sudden, unexplained diversion (or is it a reversion?), seem to revert back to their punkier incarnation. To the Fugazi-favoring demographic described earlier, songs like “Electric,” “I See No One” and “Freaky” will no doubt provide some relief from the hoedown and may prove to be New Moon’s saving grace. To others, including myself, this shift is an annoyance that disrupts the more reserved pace of the album; it seems as though the guys, tired of the granola and the morning fog, just threw up their hands, polished off a few dusty B-sides and decided to call it a day. Smoothing an epochal shift with a sonic mix of new and old isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Arguably, the band did the same thing when it cast aside the spacey sounds of Leave Home for the alt-leaning Open Your Heart. But on New Moon, the transition is rocky, more of a cop-out than a compromise.
 
As difficult to stomach as the countrified transformation of these New York brats may initially seem, it was still a ballsy move, and with repeated listens, I began wondering if this were part of the Men’s natural evolution, from post-punk, to punk, to rock, to epic anthems à la Tom Petty. But at this point, the steps seem furtive, undecided, unfinished. At the rate they’re building their discography, the Men will get their Neil Young cred eventually. Just not right now.

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A concept album concerned with themes of isolation, paranoia and dissatisfaction with modern society, The Sticks stands as the darkest, most ambitious project in the quintet’s catalog to date. Gone is the colorful, instrumentally-rich folk playground that was Eureka, the band’s 2010 release and an undiscovered indie classic. In its place are the thorny, mud-caked dredges of stormy arena rock and surly ballads. With its grandiose sulk and its Metric-like production, lead single “Let’s Fall In Love” stands in polar opposition to “Baby Don’t Dance,” Eureka’s bubbly New Wave standout.
 
The moodier soundscapes are accompanied by a more pronounced eschatology, filtered through the signature wit of frontman Ryan Guldemond: Whether he’s foreshadowing the end of things in creepy opening sketch “Omen,” cheerfully awaiting the inevitable in the punchy pop of “Latter Day,” or simply, well, “Waiting For The World To End,” Guldemond spends a lot of time on The Sticks fretting about Armageddon; now that 2012 has come and gone, you almost want to reach through your headphones, grab him by the shoulders and tell him that the Mayans were wrong. More often than not, the songs lean toward the melodramatic, and while theatricality has always been an integral component of Mother Mother’s rock trickery, songs like “Waiting For The World To End” and “The Sticks” crumble under too much created tension and not enough of the understated snark that made the band so likable in the first place.
 
Unsurprisingly, then, The Sticks’ best moments come when Mother Mother stops living deliberately and just starts living. New single “Bit By Bit” is a hoedown from hell, full of sass and glam-rock glitter; “Dread In My Heart” tackles the album’s greater concerns with an ease that’s more affecting than the frenzy of the production numbers, while simultaneously accomplishing the difficult task of transforming a line like “There’s a godawful shitty feeling of dread in my heart” into one of the most hummable, humble little hooks of recent memory. And “Let’s Fall In Love” is the record’s lead single for a reason—it’s the first time the band’s hit us so forcefully with a full-on, folk-less rock song, and it begs to be played again and again.
 
This isn’t a question of whether or not Mother Mother is capable of ambitious musicianship; their willingness to go topsy-turvy with instrumentation and song structure and keep the listener guessing has made them big stars in Canada and, most likely, soon in the States as well. But ultimately, this escape into The Sticks is too self-aware, too deliberately alive, to achieve the artistic clarity that Thoreau got from his time in the boondocks.

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Instead of James Murphy, rock producer John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, the Hold Steady) is at the helm this time around, and he plays to the band’s strengths: the ebullient guitar solos, the balls-out attitude and, most importantly, the larger-than-life choruses. The influences are crystal-clear: Springsteen, Thin Lizzy, Boston. As such, tracks like the cowbell-heavy opening track guitar duel, “Electric Fever,” and the Cars-indebted “Girls Want Rock” owe much of their wallop to their nostalgic flavor. With its confluence of shouted “Yeah!”s and Pixy Stix-sweet solos, “Hangin” is a slice of power-pop heaven, while the summery, country-inflected “Hold You Close” is a heartland-rock banger John Cougar Mellencamp could’ve written.
 
The paradigm here is catchiness, rather than complexity, and it has its drawbacks. Most of the songs follow the classic-rock blueprint: crunchy verse, giddy chorus, another crunchy verse, stacked solo, rinse, repeat. Additionally, with the three guitarists taking up much of the sonic space, Sprangers’ vocals can drift into the background. He’s more than capable of belting out a refrain, but at certain points—like the New Wave slow-jam “True Love”—his singing can seem wan compared to the instrumental acrobatics behind him. For the most part, Love Sign never loses its propulsive appeal; the only slip-up is “Dance All Night,” a tepid piano ballad that seems misplaced among the bangers that dominate the rest of the album.
 
Still, Love Sign escapes almost all of the sophomore LP pitfalls. Free Energy earned a considerable amount of praise for forgoing the frivolity and focusing on the fun, and the Philadelphia rockers know better than to mess with that formula. Thirty years ago, that was the M.O., and in this age of seriousness, records like this one serve as an important reminder that rock ‘n’ roll is, at the end of the day, all about capturing a youthful spirit.

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